A Quote by David Foster Wallace
In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the 'magical thinking' of children that insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash.
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It is well known that measles is an important development milestone in the life and maturing processes in children. Why would anybody want to stop or delay the maturation processes of children and of their immune systems?
In life and in love, there is only that moment, the NOW. The only reality we know is what we experience this very second. Reality is not what has passed or what has yet to come into being. Grabbing hold of this simple idea makes life magical because it brings love alive.
Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings?
Iconography becomes even more revealing when processes or concepts, rather than objects, must be depicted for the constraint of a definite "thing" cedes directly to the imagination. How can we draw "evolution" or "social organization," not to mention the more mundane "digestion" or "self-interest," without portraying more of a mental structure than a physical reality? If we wish to trace the history of ideas, iconography becomes a candid camera trained upon the scholar's mind.
Nothing in life is more exciting and rewarding than the sudden flash of insight that leaves you a changed person .
The relation of photography and language is a principal site of struggle for value and power in contemporary representations of reality; it is the place where images and words find and lose their conscience, their aesthetic and ethical identity.
Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life.
People who are slavish to a fantasy ideology become very lonely in the world. It's very alienating and sometimes reality is very threatening to this magical way of thinking. On the other hand, if it is a politician or leader that chooses for whatever reason to remain in this state of magical thinking, then they should be called out for it strongly and repeatedly.
The purer the artist's 'mirror' is, the more true reality reflects in it. Overseeing the historical culture of art, we must conclude that the mirror only slowly is purified. Time producing this purifying shows a gradual, more constant and objective image of reality.
Reality became for me a problem after my experience with LSD. Before, I had believed there was only one reality, the reality of everyday life. Just one true reality and the rest was imagination and was not real. But under the influence of LSD, I entered into realities which were as real and even more real than the one of everyday. And I thought about the nature of reality and I got some deeper insights.
I believe there is no part of our lives, our adult as well as child life, when we're not fantasizing, but we prefer to relegate fantasy to children, as though it were some tomfoolery only fit for the immature minds of the young. Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.
By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or memorable phrase of the mind itself. He believed it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care (saving them for later use, that is), seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.
The things shamans deal with are extremely practical. They break down parameters of normal historical reality. Magical passes are just one aspect of that.
Brazil is my way to see the world. Being born in that country means: "you don't have a wall separating the physical reality from the magical reality."
Life is endless reality. There is reality after reality, spinning on endlessly into the cosmos, billions and billions of manifest universes. Underlying all of this is the unmanifest, the absolute reality.
Consensus reality seemed like a dull, dead-end street compared to the intense, mutable reality of visions or whatever they were - neurological misfires. I expected life to be full of sudden, inexplicable surprises. When these things didn't happen for a while, life seemed dull and painful.
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