Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace StevensRead
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that modern tools and media distort our perception of reality, favoring negativity over positivity.
Wallace Stevens reflects on the ironic relationship between modern representations of life, such as photography, and our understanding of good and evil. He indicates that society tends to embrace negative aspects of life while rejecting the positive, highlighting a troubling trend in how we consume and interpret the world around us.
In practice
In a discussion about media representation at a conference.
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
LIGHT FROM WITHIN my friend, cancer got you damn it: you had it beat for seven years at least. how did it come back? Why all that pain. again. and you, such a fighter you fought me over and over with tears and words and promises. you fought for me with honesty and a light so bright it hurts my heart. sweet lorna. at peace now finally no more battles, just light from within a flickering candle in the dark burns with you.
Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.
One fire burns out another's burning, One pain is lessen'd by another's anguish.
I don't believe there's an atom of meaning in it.
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
I've noticed that even people who believe in fate look both ways before crossing the street.
Strong moral arguments exist for why we should often try to ignore stereotypes or override them. But we shouldn't assume they represent some irrational quirk of the unconscious mind. In fact, they're largely the consequence of the mind's attempt to make a rational decision.
You take fantasies, which for thousands of years belonged to the religious realm - overcoming death or our merging with the universe - and you suddenly start talking about them in a more technical perspective as something that can be achieved, not after you die with the help of supernatural beings, but in this very life with the help of technology.
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