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.
I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power.
I am not interested in the past. I am interested in the future, for that is where I expect to spend the rest of my life.
why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.
I am 100 percent in favor of the intelligent use of drugs, and 1,000 percent against the thoughtless use of them, whether caffeine or LSD. And drugs are not central to my life.
The best and safest way of philosophising seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish those properties by experiences [experiments] and then to proceed slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments.
Some African leaders actually dare to suggest that democracy is a concept alien to traditional African society. This is one of the most impudent political blasphemies I can think of.
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