Resonant Thoughts
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Resonant Thoughts: John Berger’s “And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos” (2026)
“The problem of time is like the darkness of the sky. Every event is inscribed in its own time. Events may cluster and their times overlap, but the time in common between events does not extend as law beyond the clustering” (13). “Most workers in the world carry the same physical stigma: a sign of… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: W.G. Sebald’s “The Rings of Saturn” (1995)
“I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert,… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Dave Eggers’ “Contrapposto: A Novel” (2026)
“Rembrandt lived three hundred years ago and knew far more than we do now. How is that? Why is that? Why have we gotten less skilled, less competent, less knowledgeable, less adept and versatile? How can that be?” (168). “You have been mistaught! You have been fed the lie that intent is achievement. It is… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Cory Doctorow’s “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI” (2026)
“Art is what happens when an artist has a big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling in their mind, which they infuse into some artistic medium—a book, a song, a dance, a painting, a photograph, and such—in the hopes of making a facsimile of that big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling materialize in the minds of people who… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Ben Lerner’s “Transcription” (2026)
“these impossibly delicate things were the result of a thousand rapid choices and adjustments, movements of the hand” (20). “kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and as artificial the next, a kind of duck–rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed” (20).… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Paul Morley’s “A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love with Classical Music (and Decided to Rewrite Its Entire History)” (2020)
“Do we lose that sense of the greater purpose of music – once it is set inside the flat, if relentless and very helpful, music services – as this other language, this alien presence taking on the unknown, defending us against all kinds of threats, danger and tension? Will this near-monstrous availability of music, the… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: John Wyre’s “Touched By Sound: A Drummer’s Journey” (2002)
“Dan [Fred D. Hinger] showed me the importance of one note. His enthusiastic response to the sound of one touch was an explosion of well-being and positive reinforcing energy. He thoroughly understood how our energy and touch combine to influence the character of the sound we produce” (10). “Finding solutions–there are no limitations to the… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: David Epstein’s “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better” (2026)
“artifacts of chance” (39). “Given complete freedom, we tend to default to simple solutions, not because they are good, but because they are familiar” (47). “Because we are cognitive misers, breakthrough creativity happens when the easy and intuitive path is blocked—by choice or by force” (48). “Constraints push the brain beyond its default tendencies, forcing… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2019)
“Anomalies are often the path to a new understanding.” “Today all the available sources of intuitive life – the natural world, cultural tradition, the body, religion and art – have been so conceptualised, devitalised and ‘deconstructed’ (ironised) by self-consciousness, explicitness and the systems and theories used to analyse them, that their power to help us… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: John Berger’s “Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing” (1960/2025)
“After we have responded to a work of art, we leave it, carrying away in our consciousness something which we didn’t have before. This something amounts to more than our memory of the incident represented, and also more than our memory of the shapes and colors and spaces which the artist has used and arranged.… Continue reading
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