Author: Ghosh, Amitav
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When I look into my past the river seems to meet my eyes, staring back, as if to ask, Do you recognize me, wherever you are?
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Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge
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Dark Mountain Project, ‘a network of writers, artists and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilization tells itself
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the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.
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if contemporary trends in architecture, even in this period of accelerating carbon emissions, favour shiny, glass-and-metal-plated towers, do we not have to ask, What are the patterns of desire that are fed by these gestures?
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Only much later did I realize that the tornado’s eye had passed directly over me. It seemed to me that there was something eerily apt about that metaphor: what had happened at that moment was strangely like a species of visual contact, of beholding and being beheld.
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To think of it in terms of chance and coincidence seemed only to impoverish the experience: it was like trying to understand a poem by counting the words.
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Improbable is not the opposite of probable, but rather an inflexion of it, a gradient in a continuum of probability.
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For, as Ian Hacking, a prominent historian of the concept, puts it, probability is a ‘manner of conceiving the world constituted without our being aware of it’.
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Why did fillers suddenly become so important? Moretti’s answer is ‘Because they offer the kind of narrative pleasure compatible with the new regularity of bourgeois life. Fillers turn the novel into a “calm passion”… they are part of what Weber called the “rationalization” of modern life: a process that begins in the economy and in the administration, but eventually pervades the sphere of free time, private life, entertainment, feelings… . Or in other words: fillers are an attempt at rationalizing the novelistic universe: turning it into a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all.’