Peter Watson Quotes

The curious fact is that biology tells us nothing about desire. And, when you think about it, culture -- novels, movies, opera, and quite a lot of painting -- is about desire, how we manage desire, how we suffer from it, and how it brings us joy when we get things right. A story without desire -- and that means without the insistence of desire -- will be empty, dry, and more or less aimless. That is one reason we read novels, to see how people fall into awkward moral situations and then try to extricate themselves. This is why there is so much anguish in the world: frustrated desire is every bit as miserable as poverty, because desire is no respecter of one's position in life: everyone goes through it.

One of the many innovations of modernism was the new demands it placed on the audience. Music, painting, literature, even architecture, would never again be quite so 'easy' as they had been.

Computable Numbers' into practice.21 This was

The final new elements in music making (as opposed to listening, considered in the next section) were introduced by Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826). Weber had a diseased hip and walked with a limp but he was a virtuoso of the guitar and an excellent singer, until he damaged his voice by accidentally drinking a glass of nitric acid.

Grief is an ocean where the waves obey their own rhythm, their own tide, where we are just thrown about to stay afloat as best we can. Where there is in fact no guarantee that we will keep our heads above water.

In some ways this was Goethe's greatest achievement: the search for the serial relationships in nature, emphasizing border experiences, the junctures where "the real joints of nature" are located, is most likely to reveal the process of change, development, organizing principles. This is also why it needed individuals who were both poet and scientist, who could combine "imagination, observation and thought in the act of language.

Doubt is an awful snake of an emotion. Once it has you in it's grip, it won't let go. It spoils everything.

For many scientists, as Lyotard concedes, scientific knowledge is the only form of knowledge there is, but if so, how then do we understand fairy stories and law?

...for example, if Freud is wrong, as i and many others believe, where does that leave any number of novels and virtually the entire corpus of surrealism, Dada, and certain major forms of expressionism and abstraction, not to mention Richard Strauss' 'Freudian' operas such as Salome and Elektra, and the iconic novels of numerous writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf? It doesn't render these works less beautiful or pleasurable, necessarily, but it surely dilutes their meaning. They don't owe their entire existence to psychoanalysis. But if they are robbed of a large part of their meaning, can they retain their intellectual importance and validity? Or do they become period pieces? I stress the point because the novels, paintings and operas referred to above have helped to popularise and legitimise a certain view of human nature, one that is, all evidence to the contrary lacking, wrong.

Live with the consequences of your deeds and enjoy the warmth they create. The only warmth in the cold, indifferent universe is that which we create ourselves. And that is what a work of art is, it is what a constructed life is, a fulfilled life, the warmth of acts.

Even by the end of the seventeenth century, fifty years before our starting point, there was no shortage of people in Europe who felt that the Christian religion had been gravely discredited. Protestants and Catholics had been killing each other in the hundreds of thousands, or millions, for holding opinions that no one could prove one way or the other. The observations of Kepler and Galileo transformed man's view of the heavens, and the flood of discoveries from the New World promoted an interest in the diversity of customs and beliefs found on the other side of the Atlantic. It was obvious to many that God favored diversity over uniformity and that Christianity and Christian concepts - like the soul and a concentration on the afterlife - were not necessarily crucial elements since so many lived without them.