A Commonplace Book

"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."

Progress is an ongoing act of myth-making. Most of the time the true story is a mixed one. Things are lost. Others gained. A happy ending is when you come out ahead. A story full of setbacks is a tragedy.

When the religion of technology drives a culture, that culture, to riff on Thoreau, will eventually find itself directionless, with improved, and sometimes barely improved or even unimproved, means to nonexistent ends. It will eventually find itself fruitlessly focused on the incremental optimization of quantifiable measures of little consequence. It will eventually find itself in a crisis of meaning and characterized by various degrees of alienation and polarization.

Ann Black [Rebecca Pidgeon]: Everybody makes their own fun. If you don't make it yourself, it isn't fun. It's entertainment.

While we once had to amuse ourselves, we now expect to be entertained.

[N]o book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

If I could have made movies without any dialogue, it would have been paradise.

Dialogues for me belong to theater or television. I mean, I'm not someone who remembers movies because of their lines. I remember movies because of their images, because of the ideas that are being hidden or unfold through images. And that's the power of cinema. For me, it's not about dialogue.

And I hope one day I will be able to make a movie with as less dialogue as possible.

By the way, that's why silent movies were so powerful and still today the best movies. I mean, it's like normally a great movie, you should be able to watch it without sound. And that's the ultimate goal, yes.

The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are, because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.

Determinism is the result of the behaviour of those who are determined to ignore what is happening around them. Recognition of the psychic and social effects of technological change make it possible to neutralize the effects of innovation.

This place [a grocery store] recharges us spiritually, it prepares us, it's a gateway or pathway. Look how bright. It's full of psychic data.... Everything is concealed in symbolism, hidden by veils of mystery and layers of cultural material. But it is psychic data, absolutely. The large doors slide open, they close unbidden. Energy waves, incident radiation. All the letters and numbers are here, all the colors of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases. It is just a question of deciphering, rearranging, peeling off the layers of unspeakability. Not that we would want to, not that any useful purpose would be served.... Look how well-lighted everything is. The place is sealed off, self-contained. It is timeless.

When we confront fundamental questions about the nature of reality, things quickly get weird.... I submit that weirdness is inevitable, and that something radically bizarre will turn out to be true.... [A]ll broad-ranging attempts to articulate the fundamental structure of reality, no matter how soberly we approach them, inevitably become both bizarre and dubious. Bizarre, in that they defy common sense. And dubious, in that they allow for reasonable doubt.

...The key is to become comfortable weighing competing implausibilities, something that we can all try--so long as we don't expect to all arrive at the same conclusions.

Will we never know the right interpretation of quantum mechanics, or the grounds of consciousness, or whether we live in a simulation? Not necessarily. Science can reveal answers to questions that previously seemed unsolvable. What once appeared bizarre can become comfortable and familiar.

We are now porous not only to the collective ambience of human thought, but also to something half-human, something sub-human: It is neither you nor I deciding which of the photographs and poems I post on my Instagram you get to see; the algorithm that decides for you is not sentient in the sense that you and I are. It was once composed in code by human hands moved by human minds, and now it steers the bottom line of a human-governed company, but at that moment, that inflection point where it metes out your allotment of cultural material, it is pure machine — an automaton of variables, not one of them visible to you, not one controllable, together shaping what truth and beauty may appear before you, feeding what you may think about today and dream about tonight...

Though far from perfect, the fact that the film constantly wears its earnest sentimentality on its sleeve registers as less of an irritating bug than an endearing feature in today's cultural discourse where an entire generation of viewers have become so inescapably irony-pilled that they don't seem capable anymore of emotionally responding to an ultra-sincere tear-jerker without an ounce of self-deflating cynicism.

We should bear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation--to make a point--than to further the cause of truth. The latter end is only pursued when it seems coincident with the former.

The print which merely falls in with ordinary opinion (however well founded this opinion may be) earns for itself no credit with the mob. The mass of the people regard as profound only him who suggests pungent contradictions of the general idea.

In ratiocination, not less than in literature, it is the epigram which is the most immediately and the most universally appreciated. In both, it is of the lowest order of merit.