Mudita Journal

Quotes There Should Be

June 9, 2007 · Filed under: Intellectual
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A friend of mine occasionally gives himself, as an intellectual exercise, the task of writing a passage coming from a voice that is not his own.

“The whole idea of my ‘quotes there should be’ exercises,” he writes, “is to project myself into voices not wholly my own, but which I feel some affinity with and want to learn something from.”

I read his latest batch of quotes and found them beautifully evocative.

He gave me permission to reproduce them (anonymously), so they’re shown below. I’m adding only paragraph breaks, to aid readability.

QUOTE 1: You haven’t really looked at a painting until you’ve spent a few weeks making amends, apologizing to and thanking people in your life who deserve it, asserting in no uncertain terms who you are now and what you want and what you will do; after having gone several months eating well, sleeping well, holding to an exercise regimen; then positioned yourself before the painting in a silent space free of distraction, closed your eyes and meditated for several hours, long enough to achieve light, humming, dynamic, effortless contact with the senses, and harmony with gravity and the earth — total inner freedom and balance; then, once in this state, slowly opened your eyes to behold the painting, and given yourself over to the experience completely, let that surface of paint become everything inside and outside and through you, and sustained that for as long as intuition said to.

Only then have you been truly present with an artwork. Strolling through museums bending over to read placards — Folly! Better to do cartwheels through the place and get your blur of color that way.

QUOTE 2: We worry about nuclear war, climate change, pandemics, terrorism, overpopulation, underpopulation, resource depletion, civic deterioration, economic collapse, too many fat kids.

Long term, though — if our species survives hundreds and thousands of years, renders most physical labor unnecessary, achieves some stability of material survival — ultimately the challenges will be psycho-philosophical.

Can the majority of a race of highly intelligent beings cope with the possibility they might be living in a simulation? that reality might just be information, or processes? that they’re in a world whose existence is inexplicable, as in earlier times it didn’t bother us that it was? that the most vigorous and grounded rationalities must at some point self-destruct? that selves are nothing?

We’re protected in our age, save for the relatively few unlucky souls, like Pascal, Vonnegut, my landlady.

There are serene end states, there are hale end states, reconstructed ways of being in a world we never knew we didn’t understand, as creatures we never knew we didn’t understand. But the paths to those end states, for those wired to need to deeply know, are treacherous.

A whole society negotiating those gauntlets at once — that is a scary thought.

Post-Eliot’s Wasteland, 20th century genocide-riddled degeneracy is a trifle compared to what may lie ahead.

The sensibilities behind what we loosely call ‘postmodernism’, as thus far manifested in history, have been more than tolerable, more than assimilable.

We don’t see the protective cloak we’ve been wrapped in.

QUOTE 3: Hurrying down the wharf I thought of my circulatory system as a system moving through space.

Which, of course, it is. Abstract away all other anatomy — there’s the system, heart & vessels, now suspended above a street, now hovering over a mattress, now stuffed inside a taxi cab except for one little part that’s sticking out the window, now darting around a basketball court like some rapidly morphing blood cloud.

Hurrying down the wharf it seemed to me like a pet that always goes with you, adorably just doing what it does, all it knows to do. Amazing, complex, loyal, yet dumb. It inspired that pet tenderness.

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