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.