We chart delusions through collective agreement.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that our shared beliefs can often be based on illusions that we collectively accept as truth.
Siri Hustvedt's quote emphasizes the idea that the realities we perceive are often shaped by societal consensus rather than objective truth. It reflects on how individuals can collectively agree on falsehoods or delusions, which then form the basis of their understanding and interpretation of the world around them. This concept invites us to question the validity of our shared beliefs and consider the impact of social dynamics on our perceptions.
In practice
During a discussion about social media's impact on public opinion, one might reference this quote to highlight how shared beliefs can distort reality.
Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through the categories of psychiatric medicine at a given moment in history, categories which are continually shifting and being named or renamed.
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.
under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed
People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.
I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.
In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them.
When I went to first grade and the other children said that their fathers were farmers, I simply didn't believe them. I agreed in order to be polite, but in my heart I knew that those men were impostors, as farmers and as fathers, too. In my youthful estimation, Laurence Cook defined both categories. To really believe that others even existed in either category was to break the First Commandment.
I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can...And, to the utmost of my power, I exhort all other men to do the same...I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.
What sense or thought do they have? They follow the popular singers, and they take the crowd as their teacher.
Feminine virtue is nothing but a convenient masculine invention.
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