The Way We Live Now |
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both. |
This city is neither a jungle nor the moon. . . . In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of bleeding energies. Close up, it is a fairly legible printed circuit, a transistorized labyrinth of beastly tracks, a data bank for asthmatic voice-prints. |
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt. |
Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. |
Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures. |
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt. |
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone. |
We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters. |
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine |
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up |
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death. |
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death. |
What we need is to use what we have. |
With more people, there are more voices to tune out. |