Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that all events in our lives are interconnected and intentional, rather than random occurrences.
J. G. Ballard's quote emphasizes the idea that the events and experiences we encounter are not merely accidental; instead, they are deep, meaningful assignments that shape our lives and destinies. By stating that there are no coincidences, Ballard invites us to reflect on the significant connections and patterns in our lives, implying that every experience contributes to our personal narrative and growth.
In practice
In a motivational speech about finding purpose in life.
Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.
Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell.
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?
Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.
We know that the wildest and most moving dramas are played not in the theatre but in the hearts of ordinary men and women.
When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of 'saving' the suicidal is based on a hair-raising misapprehension of the nature of existence.
If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize that we were alone?
And I walk out of space Into an overgrown garden of values, And tear up seeming stability And self-comprehension of causes. And your, infinity, textbook I read by myself, without people - Leafless, savage medical book, A problem book of gigantic radicals.
Everything is Spirit - in essence, though hidden in manifestation. If you had the perception, you would see God in everything.
If we don't take responsibility for each other, it seems to me the future is going to be even bleaker.
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