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.
It doesn't matter if an animal can reason. It matters only that it is capable of suffering and that is why I consider it my neighbor.
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe._x000D_ _x000D_ And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;_x000D_ _x000D_ And thereby hangs a tale.
The custom and fashion of today will be the awkwardness and outrage of tomorrow - so arbitrary are these transient laws.
One should always look to the end of everything, how it will finally come out. For the god has shown blessedness to many only to overturn them utterly in the end.
Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes.
Grace, by definition, is something that God is not required to grant. He owes a fallen world no mercy.
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