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.
Interpretation
Deserts symbolize a timeless space where creativity and profound thoughts can flourish, free from the constraints of conventional time.
In this quote, J. G. Ballard reflects on the unique quality of deserts as places devoid of future expectations, allowing for a sense of timelessness. He suggests that in such barren landscapes, human constructs—whether cities, monuments, or modern establishments like shopping malls—exist outside the normal flow of time, creating a fertile ground for significant figures and creativity to emerge, similar to the way religious leaders have historically risen from desert environments.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of creativity in modern society, this quote can highlight how unconventional spaces can inspire innovation.
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?
The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change.
Beloved," said the Glorious One, "unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.
Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
The real cause of hunger is the powerlessness of the poor to gain access to the resources they need to feed themselves.
The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.
I prefer to be accused unjustly, for then I have nothing to reproach myself with, and joyfully offer this to the good Lord. Then I humble myself at the thought that I am indeed capable of doing the thing of which I have been accused.
The more there is on offer, the more you don't want. Fifty options of cereal does not hone an epicurean expertise in the finer points of puffed rice, it murders appetite.
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