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- Art does not illuminate — it is illuminated, the way a cathedral receives light. A work of art is a cathedral. A structure that can be inhabited.
- Notice that all the greatest poets of the 20th century — Rilke, Crane, Stevens to name a few — are all ecstatically agnostic. We could think of modern poetry as a direct line from Dante to Rilke: the evolution from concrete Catholic cosmology to an indefinite, spiritualized cosmology; an aestheticized, modernist cosmology. The evolution of poetry can be pegged to the evolution of belief.
- When I traded my smartphone in for a flip-phone last week, I felt a shift in my underlying cognition. I was suddenly inhabiting a different brain. I felt like my old self — a self I had forgotten about. Cognitive extenders — pens, books, computers — are part of our cognition is so far as they radically alter our cognition.
- We overrate what our brain does, and underrate what is done to our brain.
- I’m reading through Proust from start to finish for the first time; no doubt, this is why I’m thinking of art as a cathedral (a metaphor that is not mine… I think Borges makes this comparison somewhere. He refers to Ulysses as a cathedral).
- My hunch is that anxiety — the anxiety of living in a hyper-connected society — shuts down non-essential cognitive function. The brain constantly overwhelmed, rations its energy. We don’t realize that we’re running at 50% or less.
- Spirit versus machine: the central religious question of the next hundred years (or more).
- Not long ago, a parent brought a child into a unique homeland: a community, a language, a dialect, a family, an ecosystem — into a context in which the spirit could grow. Now, parent brings a child into nowhere: a fractured info-verse; a spiritual desert.
