Print encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion.
Interpretation
The act of printing gives a finality to written texts, indicating they are complete.
Walter J. Ong emphasizes the role of print in creating a sense of permanence and closure in literature. Unlike oral traditions where stories evolve and change, printed texts are fixed, conveying the idea that what is written has reached a definitive state, accruing meaning and authority in its final form.
In practice
A writer might use this quote during a book launch to highlight the importance of their printed work.
Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention writing has transformed human consciousness.
A totalitarian power is mainly busy in keeping itself alive.
Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick.
Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster. This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.
The society in which we live is the result of our psychological state.
Serenity comes from the ability to say βYesβ to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say βNoβ to the wrong choices made by others.
When you are not the doer how can the attachment happen? You do a small thing and you become attached. You say, "I have done this." You would like everybody to know that you have done this and you have done that. This ego is the barrier for the supreme understanding. Drop the doer and let things happen. That's what Tilopa means by being loose and natural.
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