"At times you can almost see it, this flypaper we're attached
to, this mechanism we labor in, this delusion we inhabit. A thing of such
magnitude can be hard to make out, of course, but you can rough out its shape
and mark its progress, like Lon Chaney's Invisible Man, by its effects: by
the things it renders quaint or obsolete, by the trail of discarded notions
it leaves behind. What we're leaving behind today, at record pace, is whatever
belief we might once have had in the value of unstructured time: in the privilege
of contemplating our lives before they are gone, in the importance of uninterrupted
conversation, in the beauty of play. In the thing in itself—unmediated,
leading nowhere. In the present moment."
—Mark
Slouka, "Quitting the Paint Factory," Harper's, November
2004
my
"read" shelf:
