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Of all the nations I have visited the U.S.A. and Russia suit me best. The people seem more ready to talk to strangers without being formal or disapproving. Is this because, like me, they have very little past?

There was nothing heroic in what I did next, dealing with the baby and my own car and the stalled nose-to-tail traffic that made the three miles to the babysitter’s seem like a trek across the wastelands of the earth—it was just life, that was all

They were stalled at the lights, a single driver in every car, the cars themselves like steel shells they’d extruded to contain their resentments

Bernal Díaz can save both is through memory. He is the first Mexican writer, the one who initiated the Spanish-language narrative tradition of the New World

‘I am a libertine, but I am neither a delinquent nor an assassin.’

the greatest moment of love is separation, loneliness, the melancholy of remembrance

the narrow confines of performance and display into a discursive realm where performance and demonstration present an argument about intellectual liberation and critique that is quite impressive and radically at odds with the aesthetics of performance as understood and accepted by the modern concert audience.

was, he said many times, his way of escaping precisely the kind of artificiality and distortion

I think, really outlined his own program as a performing musician. He spoke to the young graduates of the need to realize that music “is the product of the purely artificial construction of systematic thought,” the word artificial signifying not a negative but a positive thing, “that it does relate to an obverse” and is not at all an “analyzable commodity,” but rather that “it is hewn from negation, that it is but very small security against the void of negation that surrounds it

Music is a rational, constructed system; it is artificial because it is humanly constructed, not natural; it is an assertion against the “negation” or senselessness of what everywhere surrounds us; and most important, it depends on invention as something that involves venturing beyond system into the negation