“The universe is perfectly transparent: we exist as flaws in ancient glass.”
“To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.”
— William Blake
“The absurd is the essential concept of the first truth.”
— Albert Camus
“Progress is the realization of utopias.”
“If Western man now stops thinking and dreaming the materials of new images of the future and attempts to shut himself up in the present, out of longing for security and for fear of the future, his civilization will come to an end. He has no choice but to dream or to die, condemning the whole of Western society to die with him.”
“My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of my hosts after my talk. “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.”
“In the future, the importance of geography will be matched by the importance of values and ideas.”
“Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre (via wildcat2030)
“Everything of beauty in the world has it’s ultimate origins in the human mind. Even a rainbow isn’t beautiful in and of itself.”
“The bygone world was a world of rhythms. Today, we live in a world of [attempted] synchronization”.
“From our contemporary perspective, it is difficult to appreciate the extraordinary effect that clock time has had upon modern and modernizing societies. And it is difficult to remember, so deeply has its logic impregnated cultures and societies, that it is not “time” at all, but a social construction given the seal of scientific truth and validity through the revolution in Newtonian physics. According to this mathematical perspective, time exists not in nature and humans, but that these exist in time. Newton put the case famously in his 1687 Principia when he wrote that: “Absolute true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external.”
“Manuel Castells, in his book The Information Age: The Rise of the Network Society, argues that globalization and the information age are heralding the era of domination by real-time, or what he calls “timeless time.” Real time, for Castells, is also a kind of “non-time” which means that as the network society becomes more encompassing of culture and society, “linear, measurable, predictable time is being shattered…in a movement of extraordinary historical significance”. In his speculative social theory, Paul Virilio is even more explicit when he writes in that “the teletechnologies of real time…are killing ‘present’ time by isolating it from its here and now, in favour of a commutative elsewhere that no longer has anything to do with our “concrete presence” in the world…”
“Perhaps an easily comprehended way to think about timescapes is to think of an array of temporal features - flowing durational “scapes” - that exist in lived reality, in us, in our cultures and in nature. Each feature, or temporal scape is implicated in all the others but not necessarily of equal importance. Context is the “now” or the “present.” It is the intersecting point of contact between the different timescapes that touch our lives - or those timescapes that we ourselves bring to a context or situation to generate a uniquely experienced timescape. As Christopher Prendergast puts it: “What we call ‘the present’ is a dynamic cluster of temporal traces, of the past it has been and the future it is in the process of becoming”. What we create and experience in “the present” is, in effect, a timescape that is part of a socially constituted temporal whole, part of what is to be alive in a becoming and emergent social world.”
(…) As archeologist Christopher Gosden said: People create time and space through their actions. Time and space, in turn, become part of the structure of habitual action, shaping the nature of reference between actions.”
“It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself.”
