Sublime

Too much importance cannot be attached to this quality of seeing things for oneself; it is the stamp of a great and original mind; it is the principal quality of what one calls genius.

Marcus borrows this wonderful metaphor from Heraclitus, who said, “No man steps in the same river twice.” Because the river has changed, and so has the man.

In trying to teach Troublemaker physics, Kevin learned it himself. Seldom did Kevin look at the calendar, he was so content. He didn’t wish time away, nor did he long to be someplace else. His life was no longer a race into the future.

There is, then, an analogy–and perhaps more than mere analogy-between central vision and conscious, one-at-a-time thinking, and between peripheral vision and the rather mysterious process which enables us to regulate the incredible complexity of our bodies without thinking at all. It should be noted, further, that we call our bodies complex as a re

If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves.… There’s so much talk about the system.

Critics of suburbia, by contrast, worried that its dull uniformity would do corrosive damage to the American psyche. In the words of the American urbanist Lewis Mumford, writing in 1961, suburbia was “a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited b

Critique of Pure Reason,

But a mind that is experiencing nothing, imagining nothing, or speculating about nothing can hardly be said to be a mind at all.