René Descartes is often quoted to emphasize reason as the hallmark of Enlightenment based culture of the West. Cogito, Ergo Sum. A pithy saying indeed, “I think therefore I am,” with Latin lending the words a patina of sophistication. Descartes by profession a mathematician naturally would be inclined to believe the clarity of reason…
Polaroid’s SX-70. It won’t let you stop. Suddenly you see a picture everywhere you look… now you press the red electric button. Whirr…whoosh …and there it is. You watch and your picture comes to life, growing more vivid, more detailed, until minutes later you have a print as real as life. Soon you’re taking…
Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death… Sexual reproductive activity is common to sexual animals and humankind, but only humankind appear to have turned their sexual activity into erotic activity. Eroticism is assenting to life even in death. [A] gulf exists, for instance, between you, listening…
A man [woman] should learn to detect and watchthat gleam of lightwhich flashes across his mind from within,more than the lusterof the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he [she] dismisses without notice his thought,because it is his [hers]…. ¶1 and, Trust thyself:every heart vibrates to that iron string.Accept the place that divine…
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood (womanhood) of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its…
How to get started this morning. Last night’s sleep was troubled. Dreams, all unpleasant, but those have come infrequently lately. I realize that each of us has a young vulnerable child within. What child does not have a nightmare from time to time? It’s a big world and there are monsters about! But morning…
It is a Sunday morning. A glorious day, sunlight, all vegetation shimmers after the inch or so of rain that fell yesterday. A squirrel aspires to “carve” a habitation from an old log in the middle of our woodpile, — to give birth to it’s babies. Yesterday the squirrel peered at me from the…
Photographs are, of course, artifacts… Thus they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. They are clouds of fantasy and pellets of information. Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies – an indispensable tool of the new mass culture that took shape here after…
Of all the nationsthe United States with veins full of poetical stuffmost need poets —and will doubtless have the greatestand use them the greatest. Of all mankind the great poet is the equitable man.Not in him but off from him things aregrotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.Nothing out of its place is…
The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates. Photography expresses the American impatience with reality, the taste for activities whose instrumentality is the machine. “Speed is at the bottom of it all,” as Hart Crane said (writing about Stieglitz in 1923), “the hundredth of a second caught so precisely that the motion is…
