21
" Practical jokes are a demonstration that the distinction between seriousness and play is not a law of nature but a social convention which can be broken, and that a man does not always require a serious motive for deceiving another.
Two men, dressed as city employees, block off a busy street and start digging it up. The traffic cop, motorists and pedestrians assume that this familiar scene has a practical explanation – a water main or an electric cable is being repaired – and make no attempt to use the street. In fact, however, the two diggers are private citizens in disguise who have no business there.
All practical jokes are anti-social acts, but this does not necessarily mean that all practical jokes are immoral. A moral practical joke exposes some flaw of society which is hindrance to a real community or brotherhood. That it should be possible for two private individuals to dig up a street without being stopped is a just criticism of the impersonal life of a large city where most people are strangers to each other, not brothers; in a village where all inhabitants know each other personally, the deception would be impossible. "
― W.H. Auden , The Dyer's Hand
22
" The aesthetic construct, and nothing else, has taught us to expose ourselves to a non-enslaving experience of rank differences. The work of art is even allowed to 'tell' us, those who have run away from form, something, because it quite obviously does not embody the intention to confine us. 'La poesie ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose' Something that exposes itself and proves itself in this test gains unpresumed authority. In the space of aesthetic simulation, which is at once the emergency space for the success and failure of the artistic construct, the powerless superiority of the works can affect observers who otherwise take pains to ensure that they have no lord, old or new, above them. "
― Peter Sloterdijk , You Must Change Your Life
27
" For Elena Text fans, here is the the first paragraph of the press release which will be hitting the world's media in the days before the book launch on January 26, 017.The Elena Text: Explosive New Thriller, Hailed “Upmarket Dan Brown”, Excavates Delphi’s Most Secretive TreasureMeticulously researched and masterfully crafted by award-winning filmmaker, Martin Weitz, ‘The Elena Text: Ambition, Desire & Betrayal’ makes fact and fiction indistinguishable as it fuses a provocative, blistering thriller with the untold story of a closely-guarded secret unearthed at Delphi, Greece in the 1930s. But this isn’t just a story that exposes and unravels one of history’s most elusive and prized antiquities; it’s also an unorthodox journey into research on sexual orgasm and ecstasy, and its shocking links to prophetic teachings by the Greeks over three millennia ago. Intricate, intelligent and a new paradigm of historical fiction, it’s no wonder critics are hailing the volume as something even Dan Brown could never have conceived. "
28
" There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood. I have nothing but contempt for the people who despise money. They are hypocrites or fools. Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income half the possibilities of life are shut off. The only thing to be careful about is that you do not pay more than a shilling for the shilling you earn. You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent. I pity with all my heart the artist, whether he writes or paints, who is entirely dependent for subsistence upon his art. "
― W. Somerset Maugham , Of Human Bondage