Talking in walls

“The walls we have to erect about ourselves are immaterial walls, the walls of an idiolect whose terms and turns of phrase are not in the dictionary and the manuals of rhetoric.  Not only the talk of lovers, but every conversation that is resumed again and again becomes, over time, incomprehensible to outsiders.  There is secrecy in every conversation.  In the measure that this wall of secrecy gets thinner, we more and more utter but current opinions, conventional formulas, and inconsequential judgements”

-Alphonso Lingis, 1994 (The Community of Those Who Have Nothing In Common.  Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.  Pg. 77)

Provisions

“There are two ways to die, two ways to sleep, two ways to be stupid – a head first dive into chaos or stabilized installation in order and chitin. We are provided with enough senses and instinct to protect us against the danger of explosion, but we do not have enough when faced with death from order or with falling asleep from rules and harmony”

-Michel Serres, 1980 [2007] (The Parasite.  Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press.  Pg 127)

Oh snap

“On the level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the imbecile flatness of the present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects”

-Karl Marx, not a fan of John Stuart Mill, 1867 (Capital volume 1.  New York: The Modern Library. Pg 568)

A Task

“People thinking in the forms of free, detached, disinterested appraisal were unable to accommodate within those forms the experience of violence which in reality annuls such thinking. The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us”

-Theodor Adorno, “Johnny-Head-in-Air”, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005. Pg 56)