Bores and Boredom
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.
Death and Dying
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
Disease
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
Existence
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
Image
Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it.
Memory
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe --though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived.
Psychology
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.
Style
In the final analysis, "style" is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.
Taste
Taste has no system and no proofs.
Victims
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.
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