“Formerly, during his Parisian days, his love for artificiality had led him to abandon real flowers and to use in their place replicas faithfully executed by means of the miracles performed with India rubber and wire, calico and taffeta, paper and silk. He was the possessor of a marvelous collection of tropical plants, the result of the labors of skilful artists who knew how to follow nature and recreate her step by step, taking the flower as a bud, leading it to its full development, even imitating its decline, reaching such a point of perfection as to convey every nuance — the most fugitive expressions of the flower when it opens at dawn and closes at evening, observing the appearance of the petals curled by the wind or rumpled by the rain, applying dew drops of gum on its matutinal corollas; shaping it in full bloom, when the branches bend under the burden of their sap, or showing the dried stem and shrivelled cupules, when calyxes are thrown off and leaves fall to the ground.
This wonderful art had held him entranced for a long while, but now he was dreaming of another experiment.
He wished to go one step beyond. Instead of artificial flowers imitating real flowers, natural flowers should mimic the artificial ones.”
“Glamour is not something you possess but something you perceive, not something you have but something you feel. It is a subjective response to a stimulus. One may strive to construct a glamorous effect, but success depends on the perceiver’s receptive imagination.”
“‘What’s that, a gram?’ Price says, not apathetically.
‘New card.’ I try to act casual about it but I’m smiling proudly. ‘What do you think?’
‘Whoa,’ McDermott says, lifting it up, fingering the card, genuinely impressed. ‘Very
nice. Take a look.’ He hands it to Van Patten.
‘Picked them up from the printer’s yesterday,’ I mention.
‘Cool coloring,’ Van Patten says, studying the card closely.
‘That’s bone,’ I point out. ‘And the lettering is something called Silian Rail.’
‘Silian Rail?’ McDermott asks.
‘Yeah. Not bad, huh?’
‘It is very cool, Bateman,’ Van Patten says guardedly, the jealous bastard, ‘but that’s
nothing….’ He pulls out his wallet and slaps a card next to an ashtray. ‘Look at this.’
We all lean over and inspect David’s card and Price quietly says, ‘That’s really nice.’
A brief spasm of jealousy courses through me when I notice the elegance of the color
and the classy type. I clench my fist as Van Patten says, smugly, ‘Eggshell with
Romalian type…’ He turns to me. ‘What do you think?’
‘Nice,’ I croak, but manage to nod, as the busboy brings four fresh Bellinis.
‘Jesus,’ Price says, holding the card up to the light, ignoring the new drinks. ‘This is
really super. How’d a nitwit like you get so tasteful?’
I’m looking at Van Patten’s card and then at mine and cannot believe that Price
actually likes Van Patten’s better.
Dizzy, I sip my drink then take a deep breath.
‘But wait,’ Price says. ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet…’ He pulls his out of an inside coat
pocket and slowly, dramatically turns it over for our inspection and says, ‘Mine.’
Even I have to admit it’s magnificent.
Suddenly the restaurant seems far away, hushed, the noise distant, a meaningless
hum, compared to this card, and we all hear Price’s words: ‘Raised lettering, pale
nimbus white…’
‘Holy shit,’ Van Patten exclaims. ‘I’ve never seen…’
‘Nice, very nice,’ I have to admit. ‘But wait. Let’s see Montgomery’s.’
Price pulls it out and though he’s acting nonchalant, I don’t see how he can ignore its
subtle off-white coloring, its tasteful thickness. I am unexpectedly depressed that I
started this.
...
I pick up Montgomery’s card and actually finger it, for the sensation the card gives off
to the pads of my fingers.
‘Nice, huh?’ Price’s tone suggests he realizes I’m jealous.
‘Yeah,’ I say offhandedly, giving Price the card like I don’t give a shit, but I’m finding it
hard to swallow. ”
“But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.”
“Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.”
“Her description was as vivid as if she actually lived that way. It’s important to achieve this degree of concreteness when visualizing your ideal lifestyle. If you find that hard, if you can’t picture the kind of life you would like to have, try looking in interior decorating magazines for photos that grab you.”
“Recursion...is the primary characteristic that distinguishes the human mind from that of other animals. It underlies our ability not only to reflect upon our own minds, but also to simulate the minds of others. It allows us to travel mentally in time, inserting consciousness of the past or future into present consciousness. Recursion is also the main ingredient distinguishing human language from all other forms of animal communication...
First, then, a not-too-serious dictionary definition:
Recursion (rĭ-kûr’-zhən) noun. See recursion.
One problem here, of course, is that this implies an infinite loop, from which you may never escape in order to read the other stuff in this book. The following variant suggests a way out:
Recursion (rĭ-kûr’-zhən) noun. If you still don’t get it, see recursion.
This banks on the possibility that if you do get it after a round or two, you can escape and move on. If you don’t, well I’m sorry. ”
“glamour can serve many purposes: individual and collective; personal, social, commercial, or political. The story of glamour is the story of human longing and its cultural manifestations. Like other forms of rhetoric and art, glamour can embody good ideas or bad ones. It can inspire life-enhancing actions or destructive ones. Its meaning and its effects depend on the audience. But one thing is certain: glamour is not trivial.”
“In formal economic terms, ‘innovation’ involves the diffusion of new things and practices. The term is completely agnostic about whether these things and practices are good. Crack cocaine, for example, was a highly innovative product in the 1980s, which involved a great deal of entrepreneurship (called ‘dealing’) and generated lots of revenue. Innovation! Entrepreneurship! Perhaps this point is cynical, but it draws our attention to a perverse reality: contemporary discourse treats innovation as a positive value in itself, when it is not.”
“The protagonist in our story is therefore a subject immersed in his everyday life, taking part in various conversations; a node in various networks and an actor in various social forms. From his point of observation and action, he designs and co-designs his action on the world operating as a bricoleur: he looks for usable materials around him (products and services, but also ideas and knowledge) and, adapting and reinterpreting them, he uses them to compose his life project.”
“Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was unpleasant for her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She wanted too much to live herself. When she read about the heroine of the novel taking care of a sick man, she wanted to walk with inaudible steps round the sick man’s room; when she read about a Member of Parliament making a speech, she wanted to make that speech; when she read about how Lady Mary rode to hounds, teasing her sister-in-law and surprising everyone with her courage, she wanted to do it herself. But there was nothing to do, and so, fingering the smooth knife with her small hands, she forced herself to read.
...
The hero of the novel was already beginning to achieve his English happiness, a baronetcy and an estate, and Anna wished to go with him to this estate, when suddenly she felt that he must be ashamed and that she was ashamed of the same thing. But what was she ashamed of? ‘What am I ashamed of?’ she asked herself in offended astonishment. She put down the book and leaned back in the seat, clutching the paper-knife tightly in both hands.”
“She had come to see that, without intending to, [the letter] delivered a significant personal indictment. Might she come between them in some disastrous fashion? Yes, indeed. And having done so, might she obscure the face by concocting a slight, barely clever fiction and satisfy her vanity by sending it off to a magazine? The interminable pages about light and stone and water, a narrative split between three different points of view, the hovering stillness of nothing much seeming to happen—none of this could conceal her cowardice. Did she really think she could hide behind some borrowed notions of modern writing, and drown her guilt in a stream—three streams—of consciousness? The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella—and was necessary to it. What was she to do now? It was not the backbone of a story that she lacked. It was backbone. ”
“It was a rainy night. It was the myth of the rainy night. Dean was popeyed with awe. This madness would lead nowhere.”
“As he tried
To quench his thirst, inside him, deep within him,
Another thirst was growing, for he saw
An image in the pool, and fell in love
With that unbodied hope, and found a substance
In what was only shadow. He looks in wonder,
Charmed by himself, spell-bound, and no more moving
Than any marble statue.
He sees his eyes, twin stars, and locks as comely
As those of Bacchus or the god Apollo,
Smooth cheeks, and ivory neck, and the bright beauty
Of countenance, and a flush of color rising
In the fair whiteness. Everything attracts him
That makes him so attractive. Foolish boy,
He wants himself; the love becomes the lover,
The seeker sought, the kindler burns. How often
He tries to kiss the image in the water
Dips in his arms to embrace the boy he sees there,
And finds the boy, himself, elusive always,
Not knowing what he sees, but burning for it,
The same delusion mocking his eyes and teasing.
Why try to catch an always fleeting image
Poor credulous youngster? What you seek is nowhere
And if you turn away, you will take with you
The boy you love. The vision is only shadow,
Only reflection, lacking any substance.
It comes with you, it stays with you, it goes
Away with you, if you can go away.”
“like the gilded world seen through a candy wrapper, glamour is an illusion ‘known to be false but felt to be true,’ which focuses and intensifies a preexisting but previously inchoate yearning.”
“Strategic design often involves doing what the physicist Fritz Zwicky started doing in 1934—looking for the “missing mass”, the material that must be inescapably there, that must be causing a particular outcome. This missing mass is the key to unlocking a better solution, a solution that sticks at the initial contact point, and then ripples out to produce systemic change.
The dark matter of strategic designers is the organizational culture, policy environments, market mechanisms, legislation, finance models and other incentive, governance structures, tradition and habits, local culture and national identity, the habitats, situations and events that decisions are produced within. This may well be the core mass of the architecture of society, and if we want to shift the way society functions, a facility with dark matter must be part of the strategic designer’s toolkit.”
“My intention is to tell of bodies changed
To different forms; the gods; who made the changes,
Will help me—or I hope so—with a poem
That runs from the world’s beginning to our own days.”
“O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.”