in this case someone who is under-appreciated and over-achieving and constantly feels disrespected.

his escape to virtual reality afforded by an embedded earpiece, like a tiny, protective shell for some kind of inside-out hermit crab.

The principal problem would seem to be that in present day economies, a great many luxuries and amusements, which properly belong in a secondary economy, are sold so as to acquire the necessities of life generated in the primary economy. There are artists and authors and musicians who earn their daily crust through their art. This means that it has become a matter of necessity for people to make and sell luxuries. And it never ought to be necessary to perform such unnecessary work.

Play is thought of as the opposite of "work." Yet under the existing order play is officially allowed only children and the workers of play-as-spectacle, which is not play. It is reified through the professionalization of select people as "athletes," "artists" or "entertainers." These physical, creative activities are reserved for "professionals," who must sell the product of their "play" as spectacle.

he can draw the things that are impossible to draw: fire, beams of light, thunderbolts, flashes and sheets of lightening, and the so-called clouds on the wall, feelings, attitudes, the mind revealed by the carriage of the body, almost the voice itself.  All this he can do just with lines in the right place, and those lines all black!

which is perhaps why a medieval monk, illuminating one capital letter for months, say, was living as full a life as Brother Busymitts, who rushed through a dozen in an hour.

More sternly, in a mood of utmost reverence, they recognize that what you bring to the act of perception is often just as important as what you perceive.

There is no need, therefore, to despise, no need even to feel pity for months or years of life sacrificed in some minimal enquiry: say, the study of some uninspired medieval text and its fumbling dialect

curation

Comment-forms are dropping off blogs like vestigial tails.

We want the words. We want words that have been lovingly prepared, and agonised over. We want them when they’re ready, not served up haphazardly with artificial deadlines and incomplete information. Our interconnected world changes so rapidly, and there’s a corresponding glut of disposable publishing, and writing, and even thinking. That might not be a bad thing in itself, but it’s not what fires the imagination (and opens the wallet) of the discerning reader.

Making sense of presence invokes the full sense of the living human body in continuous seeking to understand another who cannot be fixed in any particular representations.  In making sense of presence, sense is integrated and processed in mutually interacting networks of cells encompassing from the most direct physical transformation of stimuli to the most abstract cognitive processing.

base, ignoble

Dust is the stuff of their kind, the Gods of the Copybook Headings.

I can imagine an equally true fable in which the ant, who spends his summer in grim preparations and resists all the grasshopper's invitations for fun, romance, and enlightenment, is stepped on before the first snowflake falls. The grasshopper attempts to comfort him in his final moments, but the ant sadly reflects that he now wished he had spent some of his time enjoying life. Life is short and death comes quickly to all regardless of preparations, so it's all the more important to use the time well.

Human tools allowed humans to at one time hold spades, at other times to hold swords, and again to hold paddles, as circumstances required.

Dr. Campbell says, "The more general the terms are, the picture is the fainter; the more special they are, 'tis the brighter."

They sprinkle their spoors (technically, known as hyperlinks) over the floor of the Internet jungle in the hope of being one day chanced upon by an Internet user and ingested.

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The prospect of finitude helps to account for the turn to sensation, as if intensity of presentation could make up for repetition. Of course, sensation is also a response to sheer clutter on the screen, a way to grab the most possible attention in the least amount of time. But that clutter also accounts for why everything's already been done, and so it cycles on relentlessly

premature attempt to add to knowledge