(Photograph by Irving Penn)
It is bitterly cold and blue here. I went to the studio and shot some things yesterday, but nothing pleased me. I have nothing.
"We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink."
Albert Camus, "Helen's Exile," (1948)
I must go to work.
I like bats much better than bureaucrats. I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern. -C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, preface
ReplyDelete"First, we kill all the [administrators]."
ReplyDeleteWilliam Shakespeare, (almost)
accumulation of the dollar (or whatever currency) is an abstraction that has become psychotic and disassociated from the reality of a common, sustainable good . A monomaniacal industrialist or a wage-slave worker who earns profits without any knowledge of the realities of labor and resources is an economic fascist...profiting on "windows of opportunity" that destroy a reality based life and well-being. It is said that Nazism was the perfect form of capitalism....max in...min out...100% profit.
ReplyDeletethis blog is relentless...challenges all kind of assumptions...i read it for breakfast. ha
ReplyDeletehttp://reciprocity-failure.blogspot.com/2010/01/denis-diderot.html
B, I AM a wage slave. Most of my friends are not so much. As Edmund Wilson so famously said, "There is nothing more demoralizing than having a small but adequate income."
ReplyDelete