To Whom it May Concern

This purpose of this blog is to collect occasional thought-provoking passages from books, blogs, and other sources. The blog title is stolen from the epigraph to John Cage's Silence.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Ionesco via Merton








"In all the cities of the world, it is the same... The universal and modern man is the man in a rush (i.e. a rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that a thing might be without usefulness; nor does he understand that, at bottom, it is the useful that may be a useless and back-breaking burden. If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art. And a country where art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots."


Eugene Ionesco, as quoted in Thomas Merton's Raids on the Unspeakable

No comments: