work_id,theme,provenance,created_at,text,reviewed_on,id,comments,metaphor,dictionary,updated_at,context
6449,"",Searching in HDIS (Poetry),2007-12-23 00:00:00 UTC,"Who stamped us with the minting die
Of this unconquerable need
To know the unknown Deity
And name the nameless in a creed?
Whence comes our instinct, that behind
The flimsy furniture of sense
Inheres the undiscovered Mind
From which the world had emanence?
(p. 3) ",,17125,"","""Who stamped us with the minting die /
Of this unconquerable need / To know the unknown Deity / And name the nameless in a creed?""","",2009-09-14 19:49:07 UTC,""
6804,"",Reading,2011-03-08 01:49:30 UTC,"Why is neurology so fascinating? It is more fascinating than the physiology of the body--what organs perform what functions and how. I think it is because we feel the brain to be fundamentally alien in relation to the operations of mind--as we do not feel the organs of the body to be alien in relation to the actions of the body. It is precisely because we do not experience ourselves as reducible to our brain that it is so startling to discover that our mind depends so intimately on our brain. It is like finding that cheese depends on chalk--that soul depends on matter. This de facto dependence gives us a vertiginous shiver, a kind of existential spasm: How can the human mind--consciousness, the self, free will, emotion, and all the rest--completely depend on a bulbous and ugly assemblage of squishy wet parts? What has the spiking of neurons got to do with me?
(p. 35)",,18230,"","""It is like finding that cheese depends on chalk--that soul depends on matter.""","",2011-03-08 01:50:02 UTC,""
6846,"",Reading,2011-05-14 21:09:37 UTC,"For the first time Clive considered what it might be like to feel kindly toward Garmony. It was Molly who had made it possible. In the third of the pictures he wore a boxy Chanel jacket and his gaze was turned downward; on some mental screen of selfhood he was a demure and feasible woman, but to an outsider what showed was evasion. Face it, you're a man. He was better off looking to camera, confronting us with his pretense.
(p. 27)",,18378,"","""In the third of the pictures he wore a boxy Chanel jacket and his gaze was turned downward; on some mental screen of selfhood he was a demure and feasible woman, but to an outsider what showed was evasion.""","",2011-05-14 21:09:37 UTC,""
6846,"",Reading,2011-05-14 21:25:50 UTC,"He stretched, shuddered, and yawned. There were seventy-five minutes before the first meeting and soon he would get up to shave and shower, but not yet, not while he was holding on to the day's only tranquil moment. His nakedness against the sheet, the wanton tangle of bedclothes by his ankle, and the sight of his own genitalia, at his age not yet fully obscured by the swell and spread of his gut, sent vague sexual thoughts floating across his mind like remote summer clouds. But Mandy would just be leaving for work, and his latest friend, Dana, who worked at the House of Commons, was abroad until Tuesday. He rolled onto his side and wondered whether he had it in him to masturbate, whether it might serve him well to have his mind cleared for the business ahead. He made a few absent-minded strokes, then gave up. These days he seemed to lack the dedication and clarity or emptiness of mind, and the action itself seemed quaintly outmoded and improbable, like lighting a fire by rubbing two sticks.
(p. 109)",,18381,"","""hese days he seemed to lack the dedication and clarity or emptiness of mind, and the action itself seemed quaintly outmoded and improbable, like lighting a fire by rubbing two sticks.""","",2011-05-14 21:25:50 UTC,""
6846,"",Reading,2011-05-14 21:43:46 UTC,"[...] He opened a bottle of Chablis and, ignoring the saumon en croute in the fridge, went up to the top floor, belligerently determined to start work. There would come a time when nothing would remain of Vermin Halliday, but what would remain of Clive Linley would be his music. Work--quiet, determined, triumphant work, then--would be a kind of revenge. But belligerence was a poor aid to concentration, as were the three gins and a bottle of wine, and three hours later he was still staring a the score on the piano, in a hunched attitude of work, with a pencil in his hand and a frown, but hearing and seeing only the bright hurdy-gurdy carousel of his twirling thoughts and the same hard little horses bobbing by on their braided rods. Here they came again. The outrage! The police! Poor Molly! Sanctimonious bastard! Call that a moral position? Up to his neck in shit! The outrage! And what about Molly?
(pp. 149-50)",,18384,"","""But belligerence was a poor aid to concentration, as were the three gins and a bottle of wine, and three hours later he was still staring a the score on the piano, in a hunched attitude of work, with a pencil in his hand and a frown, but hearing and seeing only the bright hurdy-gurdy carousel of his twirling thoughts and the same hard little horses bobbing by on their braided rods.""","",2011-05-14 21:48:43 UTC,""
6673,Soliloquy,Reading,2013-04-27 16:54:00 UTC,"It is naturally difficult, if one denies the existence of the second theatre, to elucidate what is meant by describing the episodes which are supposed to take place in it as self-intimating. But some points are clear enough. It is not supposed that when I am wondering, say, what is the answer to a puzzle and am ipso facto consciously doing so, that I am synchronously performing two acts of attention, one to the puzzle and the other to my wondering about it. Nor, to generalise this point, is it supposed that my act of wondering and its self-intimation to me are two distinct acts or processes indis- solubly welded together. Rather, to relapse perforce into simile, it is supposed that mental processes are phosphorescent, like tropical sea-water, which makes itself visible by the light which it itself emits. Or, to use another simile, mental processes are 'overheard' by the mind whose processes they are, somewhat as a speaker overhears the words he is himself uttering.
(pp. 158-9)",,20153,"","""Or, to use another simile, mental processes are 'overheard' by the mind whose processes they are, somewhat as a speaker overhears the words he is himself uttering.""","",2013-04-27 16:54:23 UTC,Chapter VI. Self-Knowledge
8226,"",Reading,2017-08-05 17:51:39 UTC,"Still images have a deep affinity with memory. A full recollection--say of a person--almost always involves some visual re-experiencing of expressions, gestures and bearing, some of which are held frozen in the mind.Moreover, traumatic events are more likely to be mentally stilled: people who have undergone severe traumas may have flashbacks as isolated pictures, while they recall ordinary events in a narrative manner. Memories continually change through repeated recollection, yet their tendency over time is to a reduction which mirrors that of photography--like a stack of snapshots repeatedly returned to. Such memories become archetypal crystallizations of identity--slides in the carousel of the mind.
(p. 29)",,25085,"","""A full recollection--say of a person--almost always involves some visual re-experiencing of expressions, gestures and bearing, some of which are held frozen in the mind.""","",2017-08-05 17:54:44 UTC,""
8254,"","Reading Tom Shone, ""Cuck, Old,"" New York Times Book Review (January 26, 2018). <Link to NYTimes.com>",2018-01-29 13:21:55 UTC,"""I'm a deluded old man?""
Your mind resembles a roaring wind tunnel. You told me yourself, darling. Let's have a drink and forget all this. Red or white?""",,25142,"","""Your mind resembles a roaring wind tunnel.""","",2018-01-29 13:21:55 UTC,""