Until relatively recently, mass political movements were still about basic rights of food, shelter, education and self sufficiency. The reasons fewer people vote these days, or turn up for political meetings, is that for the vast majority of us those rights have been fulfilled. These days it's in the adverts for mobile phones or foreign holidays where phrases like "Join the Revolution!" and "Cry Freedom!" are bandied about for a generation which knows nothing of their provenance. Just as now we have luxury illnesses to replace real ones, so now we have luxury politics.
I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things. ' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?
American eroticism has always been of a different provenance and complexion than the European variety, an enjoyment both furtive and bland that is closer to a blushing cartoon than a sensual celebration.
What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance. We don’t see it, because we see with it.
