______       __  __       ______       ______      ______    
   /\  == \     /\ \/\ \     /\  ___\     /\__  _\    /\  ___\   
   \ \  __<     \ \ \_\ \    \ \___  \    \/_/\ \/    \ \  __\   
    \ \_\ \_\    \ \_____\    \/\_____\      \ \_\     \ \_____\ 
     \/_/ /_/     \/_____/     \/_____/       \/_/      \/_____/ 
                                                    
       C  O  L  L  E  C  T  E  D         M  U  S  I  N  G  S     

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Stepping back from this casuistry, the general issue is the following: if all facts regarding an agent are taken into account, as well as all physical and other possibly relevant laws, there are two possibilities. In a deterministic world view, only one possible course of the world is possible if all previous facts and all laws are taken into account. In a non-deterministic view, it is arbitrary what the course of the world will be, even if all previous facts and all laws are taken into account. However, in both views it does not seem reasonable to attribute responsibility to an agent for what he did. In the deterministic case not, because the agent could do nothing else other what he actually did, and in the non-deterministic case not because it is arbitrary what the agent did and therefore not dependent on the agent himself. There is no middle way according to which the agent determines what he will do, because everything about the agent that might be relevant for the determination of what he will do is ex hypothesi included in the set of all constraints. Given these constraints the agent either has no real choice what he will do, or his act will be arbitrary. In neither of these cases does the act depend on the agent himself and in neither of them is there a ground for attributing responsibility.

-J. Hage






Everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial. Everywhere information is thought to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning, a plus value of meaning homologous to the economic one that results from the accelerated rotation of capital. Information is thought to create communication, and even if the waste is enormous, a general consensus would have it that nevertheless, as a whole, there be an excess of meaning, which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social -- just as consensus would have it that material production, despite its dysfunctions and irrationalities, opens onto an excess of wealth and social purpose. We are all complicitous in this myth.

-J. Baudrillard




[T]ransparent systems are ones which the public may reliantly trust as long as there exists something unpredictable in the observable universe.

-E. Ben-Sasson, et al.


Refusing all escort, Don Domingo mounted a meek bay horse and set out for the south, carrying no gear.

There was no reason to imagine that the old man might return one day, or might ever reach his stated destination.

-A. di Benedetto






Freedom isn't an illusion; it's perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it's simply a different context . . . . Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future.

-T. Chiang






I may be simply repeating what has always been known, but I do believe that for love to grow there must first be the impact of novelty.

-N. Soseki








You can always trust a man with multiple pens.

-D.F. Wallace


To the mind which pursues every road to its end, every road leads nowhere. To abstain is not to postpone the cold disillusionment of the true facts but to see that one arrives by staying rather than going, that to be forever looking beyond is to remain blind to what is here.

-A. Watts


Enjoyment is always gratuitous and can come no other way than of itself, spontaneously. To try to force it is, furthermore, to try to experience the future before it has arived, to seek the psychological result of attending to the present experience and thus short-circuiting or cutting out the experience itself.

-A. Watts




It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.

-W. Faulkner




But half our life is
dreams, delirium, everything that underlies

that feeds

that keeps alive the illusion of sanity, semi-
sanity, we allow

others to see.

-F. Bidart




When what we understand about
what we are

changes, whole
parts of us fall mute.

-F. Bidart






That was my first instinct -- to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

-G. Greene






What is meditiation? What is abandonment of the body? What is fasting? What is the holding of breath? It is a flight from the Self, it is a temporary escape from the torment of Self. It is a temporary palliative against the pain and folly of life. The driver of oxen makes this same flight, takes this temporary drug when he drinks a few bowls of rice wine or cocoanut milk in the inn. He then no longer feels his Self, no longer feels the pain of life; he then experiences temporary escape.

-H. Hesse




I had kissed her there rather fumblingly on the way to the tube. I don't know why I did it, unless perhaps that image in the mirror had come into my mind, for I had no intention of making love to her: I had no particular intention even of looking her up again. She was too beautiful to excite me with the idea of accessibility.

-G. Greene






Imagine a missile one hears approaching only after it explodes. The reversal! A piece of time neatly snipped out . . . a few feet of film run backwards . . . the blast of the rocket, fallen faster than sound — then growing out of it the roar of its own fall, catching up to what’s already death and burning . . . a ghost in the sky. . . .

-T. Pynchon












All architecture is what you do when you look upon it;
Did you think it was the white or gray stone? or the lines of arches and cornices?

-W. Whitman






We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.

-F.M. Ford








Outside motors are roaring: but less like transport than like some kind of stationary machine, very low earthquake frequencies coming in mixed with the cold — somehow intimating that out there your blindness after this bright indoors, will be like a sudden blow.

-T. Pynchon




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