text,updated_at,metaphor,created_at,context,theme,reviewed_on,dictionary,comments,provenance,id,work_id
"James's critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. ... In England, ideas run wild and pasture on the emotions; instead of thinking with our feelings (a very different thing) we corrupt our feelings with ideas; we produce the public, the political, the emotional idea, evading sensation and thought.... Mr. Chesterton's brain swarms with ideas; I see no evidence that it thinks. James in his novels is like the best French critics in maintaining a point of view, a view-point untouched by the parasite idea. He is the most intelligent man of his generation. (Little Review , 1918) ",2009-09-14 19:48:17 UTC,"""Mr. Chesterton's brain swarms with ideas; I see no evidence that it thinks.""",2003-07-21 00:00:00 UTC,"","",2003-10-23,"",REVISIT. Should look up original and fill in the ellipses.,Listening to NPR (Michael Krazny interviewing Epstein),16874,6390
"Hume's atomism is now discarded, and in its place we have an immediate individualism. The fashionable name just now for this immediate individuality is ""consciousness."" It means being awake. You are most truly indivisible when most awake. Sleep scatters you; sensations come storming along into the dreamer's mind, and he is a prey to each in turn. Once thoroughly aroused, you ""pull yourself together."" You get ""self-control."" You become conscious, that is, grasping masses of organized thought and handling them together. You are no longer the slave of those successive atoms into which sleep divides you. Sensations rain in on you as in a dream, but you suppress all but what are useful for your conscious purpose. You get absorbed in that purpose, and seem to triumph over time. You grip things in your attention and enjoy a second of eternity. Of course time gets you again, and what you say after ten at night is sensational and incoherent, and then you drop off into unconsciousness. To be awake is to be dead to the irrelevant; to be asleep is to be at the mercy of the irrelevant. The psychologists are working hard with this paradoxical and evasive ""consciousness."" Sooner or later they will be compelled to establish some unit of it, some criterion of its presence, and then they will give you their notion of just when an animal attains consciousness, or just when a baby wakes up, or just when you and I know what we are about. Success to them. The sooner they get their unit, the better. Whatever it is, it will have to be changed, but they can't work accurately without some criterion.
(pp. 240-1)",2011-04-26 14:33:40 UTC,"""Sleep scatters you; sensations come storming along into the dreamer's mind, and he is a prey to each in turn.""",2011-04-26 14:33:40 UTC,"","",,"","",Reading,18349,6835
"But I can't say what might be wrong with it. The mind is after all a biological product. When the cat hears the doorbell, this must be something going on, literally, in its head, not just in its furry little mind. Anyway, I won't directly attack this unformulated problem, which is as much a problem for dualism or physicalism as it is for a dual aspect theory--for they, too, are motivated by the deisre for an integrated conception of a single reality in which the mental and the physical are located in a clear relation to one another.
(p. 31)",2012-02-02 20:49:22 UTC,"""When the cat hears the doorbell, this must be something going on, literally, in its head, not just in its furry little mind.""",2012-02-02 20:49:22 UTC,"","",,"","",Reading,19578,7185
"I sometimes fancy that various archetypal situations circled tirelessly in Hitchcock's mind, like whales in a tank at the zoo. One of them was fascination of voyeurism--of watching people who do not know they are being watched. Another, famously, was the notion of an innocent man wrongly accused. And many of his films illustrate male impotence or indifference in the face of cool blond beauty. Much is said of Hitchcock's blonds (Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint, Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedren), but observe that they are not erotic playmates so much as puzzles or threats. Lisa, the Kelly character, has a hopeless love for Jeff, who keeps her at arm's length with descriptions of his lifestyle; a fashion model wouldn't hold up in the desert or jungle, he tells her.
",2013-01-10 04:13:52 UTC,"""I sometimes fancy that various archetypal situations circled tirelessly in Hitchcock's mind, like whales in a tank at the zoo.""",2013-01-10 04:13:52 UTC,"","",,"","",Reading,19952,7324