| Is man then meant to spurn the gifts of Nature? Has he born but
to pluck the bitterest fruits? For whom do these flowers grow, that the
gods make flourish at mere mortals’ feet?
. . . It is a way of pleasing Providence to give ourselves up to the various delights which she suggests to us; our very needs spring from our laws, and our desires from her inspirations. Epicurus
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| “How do we know that but every bird that cleaves the aerial way is
not an immense world of delight closed to our senses five?”
William Blake
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| Evolution didn't overload us with unnecessary abilities. For
example: We may use numbers in the millions and trillions, but they are
basically meaningless to us. many things are unavailable to us because
they are not part of our evolutionary background. In an odd way,
one-celled animals may have a more realistic sense of the world than higher
animals do, because they respond to every stimulus they encounter.
we, on the other hand, select only a few.
The body edits and prunes experience before sending it to the brain for contemplation or action. Not every whim of the wind triggers the hair on the wrist to quiver. Not every vagary of sunlight registers on the retina. Not everything we feel is felt powerfully enough to send a message to the brain; the rest of the sensations just wash over us, telling us nothing. Much is lost in translation, or is censored, and in any case our nerves don't all fire at once. Some of the remain silent, while others respond. this makes our vision of the world somewhat simplistic, given how complex the world is. The body's quest isn't for truth, its for survival. Diane Ackerman
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| "Performance means: never for the first time. It means for the
nth time... Restored behavior is living behavior treated as a film
director treats a strip of film. These strips of behavior can be
rearranged or reconstructed; they are independent of the casual systems
(social, psychological, technological) that brought them into existence.
They have a life of their own..."
Richard Schechner |
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| "It only takes an instant for an impression to become a vision"
Bill Viola |
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| "I sing the body Electric"
Walt Whitman |
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| "My own personal preference is for fiction that is steeped in history,
that takes account of ways in which our perceptions are being changed by
events around us. Global events that may alter how we live in the smallest
ways."
Dan DeLillo
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| Scientific Experiments are "unique events in the world undertaken for
the purpose of allowing something to be seen. What comes to be seen is
not something uniwue and peculiar to that event, but something that can
also be seen in similar performances in other contexts.
Perormance is first of all an execution of an action in the world which is a presentation of a phenomenon... Robert P. Crease |
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| “I want you to share my excitement at the discoveries, past and present,
which have revolutionized the way we think. From the Big Bang to black
holes, from dark matter to a possible Big Crunch, our image of the universe
today is full of strange sounding ideas, and remarkable truths.
The story of how we arrived at this picture is the story of learning to understand what we see." Steven Hawking
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