"In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers offered the real thing; that was their task. In War and Peace Tolstoy describes the battleground so closely that the readers believe it’s the real thing. But I don’t. I’m not pretending it’s the real thing. We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world. So our stories are the same; we are walking through fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes, are real. The situation is real, in the sense that it’s a commitment, it’s a true relationship. That’s what I want to write about."
Haruki Murakami
[via avidamodernaeumlixo]
(via nodalpoint)(via nodalpoint)
"Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it."
Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Bitterness is anger that forgot where it came from."
Alain de Botton
"Most of the biosphere cannot see the infosphere; it is invisible, a parallel universe humming with ghostly inhabitants. But they are not ghosts to us - not anymore. We humans, alone among the earth’s organic creatures, live in both worlds at once. It is as though, having long coexisted with the unseen, we have begun to develop the needed extrasensory perception. We are aware of the many species of information. We name their types sardonically, as though to reassure ourselves that we understand: urban myths and zombie lies. We keep them alive in air-conditioned server farms. But we cannot own them. When a jingle lingers in our ears, or a fad turns fashion upside down, or a hoax dominates the global chatter for months and vanishes as swiftly as it came, who is master and who is slave?"
James Gleick, “The Information”
"The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn’t have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors and eventually you’ll have built a palace."
The Genius of the Tinkerer (article) by Steven Johnson (via webisteme)
"Signs and symbols were not just placeholders; they were operators, like the gears and levers in a machine. Language, after all, is an instrument."
James Gleick, “The Information”
"A man who’s never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has an education he may steal the whole railroad."
Roosevelt
"The critic will certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as a riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealed by one whose feet are wounded and who knows not his name. Rather, he will look upon Art as a goddess whose mystery it is his province to intensify, and whose majesty his privilege to make more marvellous in the eyes of men."
Oscar Wilde, “The Artist as Critic” (via airasothis)
"
“What is your favorite movie?”
“What is the location of your dream vacation?”
These are “information elements,” all right. But knowledge is not fixed. Information elements can be ghostly and ephemeral. Some have half-lives measured in minutes or milliseconds. Like quantum states, they are subject to observer effects and the uncertainty principle.
"James Gleick
