Two totally unrelated quotes from books I've read recently:
"Such journeys have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one's
boundaries afterthey have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship:
try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we
previously imagined ourselves to be. Something of us is now outside, and
something of the other is now within us."
-- from The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid
"Born into the postmodern spectacle, GenXers know no other language than the
language of the spectacle, they know no other talk nor walk other than that of the
spectacle; and by definition, the spectacle knows completely the language of the
youth culture, who despite their efforts will remain naive prisoners of conformity
to the amusement society."
-- from Generation X Goes to College, by Peter Sacks
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Two for the Price of One...
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3 comments:
Mixed feelings on the second quote, as I am certainly a sucker for spectacle...but maybe it's just a normal human impulse that has just gone cancerous in our time. What's wrong with Carnival?
"who despite their efforts will remain naive prisoners of conformity to the amusement society"
...what's yer point? i'll keep makin the strings vibrate while the ship goes down...
This wasn't meant as an indictment of anyone here (I'm a GenXer too). I was interested in the idea that sometimes the things you think set you free actually trap you, and you have no way of seeing that because you're inside them. In the book, he talks more about how anti-intellectualism, the sense that it's cool to be dumb or ignorant, allows the "spectacle", which he relates to mass marketing and consumerism, to manipulate people.
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