[The poet] is like a seismograph that vibrates from every quake, even if it is thousands of miles away. It’s not that he thinks incessantly of all things in the world. But they think of him. They are in him, and thus do they rule over him. Even his dull hours, his depressions, his confusions are impersonal states; they are like the spasms of the seismograph, and a deep enough gaze could read more mysterious things in them than in his poems.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Poet and the Present Time.
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What photographs by their sheer accumulation attempt to banish is the collection of death, which is part and parcel of every memory image. In the illustrated magazines the world has become a photographable present and the photographed present has been entirely eternalized. Seemingly ripped from the clutch of death, in reality it has succumbed to it.
Siegfried Kracauer, Photography.
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It is an immense place, and so spread out
That it takes a day to cross it by omnibus.
And, far and wide, there is nothing to see
But houses, public buildings, and high monuments,
Set down haphazardly by the hand of time.
Long black chimneys, the steeples of industry,
Open their mouths and exhale fumes
From their hot bellies to the open air;
Vast white domes and Gothic spires
Float in the vapour above the heaps of bricks.
An ever swelling, unapproachable river,
Rolling its muddy currents in sinuous onrush,
Like that frightful stream of the underworld,
And arched over by gigantic bridges on piers
That mimic the old Colossus of Rhodes,
Allows thousands of ships to ply their way;
A great tide polluted and always unsettled
Recirculates the riches of the world.
Busy stockyards, open shops are ready
To receive a universe of goods.
Above, the sky tormented, cloud upon cloud,
The sun, like a corpse, wears a shroud on its face,
Or, sometimes, in the poisonous atmosphere,
Looks out like a miner coal-blackened.
There, amid the somber mass of things,
An obscure people lives and dies in silence–
Millions of beings in thrall to a fatal instinct,
Seeking gold by avenues devious and straight.
Auguste Barbier, Iambes et poèmes.
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A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. … So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it satisfies human needs, or that it first takes on these properties as the product of human labor. It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials of nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.
Karl Marx, Capital.
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We are witnessing a strange inversion: humans are becoming more similar to things and equally, the inorganic world, thanks to electronic technology, seems to be taking over the human role in the perception of events. ... In the future, as in the past, what excites and troubles us is the experience of reification, of becoming a thing, of a condition that lacks both spirituality and life, ignorant of the vehemence of the former and the organic basis of the latter.
Mario Perniola, Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art.
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The flower is perfect. It isn’t necessary to refer it to any dialectics of nature! It’s the same with everything. In its detail, the world is perfect. … Taken overall, at the level of meaning, the world is pretty disappointing, but each detail of the world, taken it its singularity, is perfect.
Jean Baudrillard, Fragments.
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The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. … For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History.
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The gaze of the slothful man rests obsessively on the window, and with his fantasy, he imagines the image of someone who comes to visit him. At the squeak of the door, he leaps to his feet. He hears a voice, runs to face the window and look out, and yet he does not descend to the street, but turns back to sit down where he was, torpid and as if dismayed. If he reads, he interrupts himself restlessly and, a minute later, slips into sleep. If he wipes his face with his hand, he extends the fingers and, having removed his eyes from the book, fixes them on the wall. Again he gazes at his book, proceeds a few lines, mumbling the end of each word he reads; and meanwhile he fills his head with idle calculations, he counts the number of pages and the sheets of the bindings, and he begins to hate the letters and the beautiful miniatures he has before his eyes, until, at the last, he closes the book and uses it as a cushion for his head, falling into a brief and shallow sleep, from which a sense of privation and hunger that he must satisfy wakes him.
Sancti Nili, De octo spiritbus malitiae. (Taken from Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture by Giorgio Agamben).