Boat hull

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

The modern way of seeing is to see in fragments.  It is felt that reality is essentially unlimited, and knowledge is open-ended.  It follows that all boundaries, all unifying ideas have to be misleading, demagogic; at best, provisional; almost always, in the long run, untrue.  To see reality in the light of certain unifying ideas has the undeniable advantage of giving shape and form to our experience.  But it also – so the modern way of seeing instructs us – denies the infinite variety and complexity of the real.  Thereby it represses our energy, indeed our right, to remake what we wish to remake – our society, ourselves.  What is liberating, we are told, is to notice more and more.

Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump, editors, Susan Sontag At the Same Time:  Essays and Speeches

Comments are welcome!