daydream nation

We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.

“Nothing we read can import new or foreign feelings that we don’t, in one form or another, already possess. ‘Every reader,’ as Marcel Proust writes in Time Regained, ‘is actually the reader of himself’. Books can’t install unknown feelings or passions into us. What they can do is develop our emotional, psychological and intellectual life, and, by doing so, show us how and to what extent we are connected.”

“And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension.”

“Riveted to some detail of the desert the eye fills with tears. Imagination at wit’s end spreads its sad wings.”

“I know the place. It is true. Everything we do Corrects the space Between death and me And you.”

Don’t imagine that I write just to write, or to publish, or to produce art. I write because this is the final goal, the supreme refinement—the temperamentally illogical refinement—of my cultivation of states of mind and feeling.

The spectator would approach art as he does a landscape. A landscape doesn’t demand from the spectator his “understanding”, his imputations of significance, his anxieties and sympathies; it demands, rather, his absence, it asks that he not add anything to it. Contemplation, strictly speaking, entails self-forgetfulness on the part of the spectator: an object worthy of contemplation is one which, in effect, annihilates the perceiving subject. […] In principle, the audience may not even add its thought. All objects, rightly perceived, are already full.