somewhere in eternity

AFter Babel argues that it is the constructive powers of language to conceptualize the world which have been crucial to man's survival in the face of ineluctable biological constraints, this is to say in the face of death. It is the miraculous - I don't retract the term - capacity of grammars to generate counter-factuals, 'if'-propositions and, above all, future tenses, which have empowered our species to hope, to reach far beyond the extinction of the individual. We endure, we endure creatively due to our imperative ability to say 'No' to reality, to build fictions of alterity, of dreamt or awaited 'otherness' for our consciousness to inhabit. It is in this precise sense that the utopian and messianic are figures of syntax.

George Steiner. Introduction to After Babel. 3rd ed. 1998. p. xiv.

at the foot of the table

Lastly, a true critic in the perusal of a book is like a dog at a feast, whose thoughts and stomach are wholly set upon what the guests fling away, and consequently is apt to snarl most when there are the fewest bones.

Jonathan Swift. "The Tale of a Tub". The Tale of a Tub and Other Works. 2006.

my mahogany desk

In time there was a day that extinguished the last eyes to see Christ; the battle of Junin and the love of Helen died with the death of a man. What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose? The voice of Macedonio Fernándes, the image of a red horse in the vacant lot at Serrano and Charcas, a bar of sulphur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?

Jorge Luis Borges. Labyrinths. 1964. 243.

anywhere

Eighty percent of everything ever buit in America has been buit in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading - the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, he "gourmet mansardic" junk-food joints, the Orwellian office "parks" featuring buildings sheathed in the same relective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic agorphobia-inducing spectacle that politicisans proudly call "growth".

- James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere (1993). p. 10.

atlantic city

On my way out of town at quarter after seven in the morning, a young pump jockey at the gas station on Arkansas Avenue - across the way from the disintegrating, boarded-up rail terminal - told me that he had just been cursed out by an Ohioan who didn't like the New Jersey state law that forbids motorists to pump their own gas. "Losers ain't too polite," he observed. He mentioned that another man had lost $20,000 at Trop World a few hours earlier and had to be dragged out of the casino kicking and screaming. I asked if this happened a lot. "Man," he said, "there's a whole world of losers out there, and sooner or later they all end up here. Only they don't think they're losers. When they find out it's, like, the surprise of their life".

- James Howard Kunstler, The Geography Of Nowhere (1993). p. 238.