11th April 2013
"Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds."— Oliver Sacks, “Speak, Memory”, in The New York Review of Books, 21 March 2013
a-l-ancien-regime: Mrs. Edmund Morton Pleydell, about 1765 Thomas Gainsborough, English, 1727–1788. MFA, Boston
9th December 2012
"There’s no such thing as mental illness. We’re all mentally ill and we’re all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don’t wind up needing extra help. So I think that “mental illness,” as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something."— The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle (via stacyangeline)
3rd December 2012
"The banality of her “real” life has thus set her up for the urgency of the completely artificial experience that has been commanded for her by Paul. She doesn’t know his name, or anything about him, but when he has sex with her it is certainly real; there is a life in that empty room that her fiance, with all of his cinema verite, is probably incapable of imagining.She finds it difficult, too, because she is a child. A child, because she hasn’t lived long enough and lost often enough to know yet what a heartbreaker the world can be. There are moments in the film when she does actually seem to look into Paul’s soul and half-understand what she sees there, but she pulls back from it; pulls back, finally, all the way — and just when he had come to the point where he was willing to let life have one more chance with him."
— Roger Ebert’s review of Last Tango in Paris, 14th October 1972
(Source: rogerebert.suntimes.com)
