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In my crazier moments I think that rigor may be akin to rigor mortis.”

“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms. . . . Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.”9m

And do you also know what “the world” is to me? Should I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a colossus [Ungeheuer] of energy, without beginning, without end, a firm, unshakable magnitude of energy that does not get bigger, does not get smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself, as a whole unchangeable in size, an economy without expenditures and losses, but likewise without growth, without income, encased by “nothingness” as by its border, nothing blurring, wasted, nothing infinitely extended, but laid into a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that would be “empty” anywhere, rather as force everywhere, as play of forces and waves of forces . . . this my Dionysian world of eternal self-creating, of eternal self-destroying, this mystery-world of the doubly voluptuous, this my beyond good and evil, without goal, if a goal does not lie in the happiness of the circle, without will, if a ring does not have good will for itself—do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? a light for you too, you hiddenmost, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly?—This world is the will to power—and nothing else! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing else!

It takes a strange kind of innocence to insist that the artist’s heart should count for more than the viewer’s gut.

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time proof that humans can work magic.” ~ Carl Sagan

Here all depends on the “fluent gestures” in “elevating facts from the prosaic to the poetic”—a point that the critic Clive James stressed in his essay on Auden in Commentary in December, 1973.

But even in 1936, a new form was on the horizon: what he called “information.” A novel must end because the physical object of the book will eventually run out of pages. But news wires and radio reports just keep coming, and, as Benjamin put it, “By now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information.”

They’re not imagining things. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, a sociolinguist at The Ohio State University, says the effort we put into overcoming a “barrier to communication” depends on (and communicates) social values. “You see the difference if you think about the way Americans typically respond to somebody with a heavy French accent versus somebody with a heavy Mandarin accent,” she explains. When it comes to names, an American who mispronounces the British surname St. Clair (think “Sinclair”), she says, will tend to have a sense of, “Oh, they have a fancy, special language, and if I don’t know how to handle that, it’s a flaw in me.” Whereas a Chinese name might provoke the reaction: “Those names are really hard to understand, and it’s not my responsibility to engage with that.”

“To put up with people, to keep open house with one's heart — that is liberal, but that is merely liberal. One recognizes those hearts which are capable of noble hospitality by the many draped windows and closed shutters, they keep their best rooms empty. Why? Because they expect guests with whom one does not "put up.”

One of the main jobs of stewards of the culture is to be continuously weeding this beautiful garden. In practical terms, that means being really proactive about hosting conversations, calling out harmful behaviour, treating each other with compassion, prioritising relationships and feelings over process and rightness.’

It is in this context that we must question the constant exercising of the language of consent (and its companion “will”). If the person who is asking for your consent holds power over you (in effect a power to decide a future, whether a door is open or not) what does it mean to give or withhold consent? I am not saying here that that all consent is coercion, but that consent in the context of asymmetrical relations of power is not a stable ground for establishing whether or not an abuse of power has occurred. It is because some have power over others, to open or close that door, that we need boundaries, rules, and norms. So much abuse of power within universities is justified by the illiberal use of the liberal language of will and consent. As I argued in Willful Subjects, some might become willing when the costs of not being willing are made too high. Being unwilling might mean being expelled from a group that would allow you to access the resources necessary for your survival, let alone progression. Being unwilling might mean being called frigid or (worse still) a feminist. These names have costs. Becoming willing might be a way of avoiding these costs.

Over-sensitive can be translated as: Sensitive to that which is not over.--Sara Ahmed

A friend once told him, “In great writing, the proportion between the total number of sentences and those sentences whose formulation was especially striking or pregnant was about one to thirty—whereas it was more like one to two in [your] case.” (“All this is correct,” Benjamin admitted.)

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk. -- Paul Klee

Semel emissum volat irrevocabile verbum. Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled. --Horace

As her patron Edward James said, her paintings were "not merely painted. They are brewed."

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