“In the idea of the faceless Imperson, technology conceals a powerful dream, the dream of not being like anything, of being nothing created. Natural forms all suggest comparison, but technical ones usually do not, so a device like a typewriter has a very decided identity but an unplaceable one. Like higher organisms, machines cover complexity with simplicity, and we forget what is inside a handpump or how typewriter linkage works, even forget that anything is there. They no longer have insides; their work is invisible and they are simply ideas, functions, powers.”

(Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces, p. 39.)

“Like many books, it is working itself free of its material. The goal of learning and of this book as an act is that the critic feel himself a participant, that the describer become the doer. The end is not an actual building but the writing by which the writer becomes as every learner will the exemplar of culture himself. A book is a thought too big and various to be seen all at once, sturdy but unencompassable ideation, and the intimate excuse for a new one after all the other books is this of giving the mind an existence outside itself.”

(Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces, from the “Forward”.)

“The six large Victorian stations in London were built from 1852 to 1902 but the alterations and additions frequently made to them in that period homogenized the group considerably. It is difficult to describe railroad stations as architecture because they are experienced less deliberately than other buildings. One of Ruskin’s clearest failings is his treatment of them as so much iron and glass, for no one ever sees a railroad station empty in the architect’s model state he is talking about, and even the idle visitor is soon agitated by the hurry around him, in the middle of arrivers and leavers catches the construction of the building only out of the corner of his eye.”

(Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces, p. 39)

“entièrement revue par l’auteur, a la même valeur d’authenticité que le texte tchèque“

(Notice affixed to the French editions of Milan Kundera’s books since 1987, noted by Peter Bilak here.)

“In addition to the traditional piano player, each theatre in Saragossa was equipped with its explicador, or narrator, who stood next to the screen and ‘explained’ the action to the audience. ‘Count Hugo sees his wife go by on the arm of another man,’ he would declaim. ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, you will see how he opens the drawer of his desk and takes out a revolver to assassinate his unfaithful wife!’

It’s hard to imagine today, but when the cinema was in its infancy, it was such a new and unusual narrative form that most spectators had difficulty understanding what was happening. Now we’re so used to film language, to the elements of montage, to both simultaneous and successive action, to flashbacks, that our comprehension is automatic; but in the early years, the public had a hard time deciphering this new pictorial grammar. They needed an explicador to guide them from scene to scene.

I’ll never forget, for example, everyone’s terror when we saw our first zoom. There on the screen was a head coming closer and closer, growing larger and larger. We simply couldn’t understand that the camera was moving nearer to the head, or that because of trick photography (as in Méliès’s films), the head only appeared to grow larger. All we saw was a head coming toward us, swelling hideously out of all proportion. Like Saint Thomas the Apostle, we believed in the reality of what we saw.”

(Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, trans. Abigail Israel, p. 32–33.)

“My conversation with the poet took place in the summer before the war. A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which it met with on its path but it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes of a final triumph over the differences between nations and races. It tarnished the lofty impartiality of our science, it revealed our instincts in all their nakedness and let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought had been tamed for ever by centuries of continuous education by the noblest minds. It made our country small again and made the rest of the world far remote. It robbed us of very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless.

We cannot be surprised that our libido, thus bereft of so many of its objects, has clung with all the greater intensity to what is left to us, that our love of our country, our affection for those nearest us and our pride in what is common to us have suddenly grown stronger. But have those other possessions, which we have now lost, really ceased to have any worth for us because they have proved so perishable and so unresistant? To many of us this seems to be, but once more wrongly, in my view. I believe that those who think thus, and seem ready to make a permanent renunciation because what was precious has proved not to be lasting, are simply in a state of morning for what is lost. Mourning, as we know, however painful it may be, comes to a spontaneous end. When it has renounced everything that has been lost, then it has consumed itself, and our libido is once more free (in so far as we are still young and active) to replace the lost objects by fresh ones equally or still more precious. It is to be hoped that the same will be true of the losses caused by this war. When once the mourning is over, it will be found that our high opinion of the riches of civilization has lost nothing from our discovery of their fragility. We shall build up again all that war has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before.”

(Sigmund Freud, “On Transience”, first published 1916, pp. 178–179 in Writings on Art and Literature, trans. James Strachey.)