A Quote by John Berger
Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.
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History produces not only the forces of domination but also the forces of resistance that press up against and are often the objects of such domination. Which is another way of saying that history, the past, is larger than the present, and is the ever-growing and ongoing possibility of resistance to the present’s imposed values, the possibility of futures not unlike the present, futures that resist and transform what dominates the present.
It is only by making the past alive again for a person that a true growth in the present is facilitated. If the past is cut off, the future does not exist.
My concern today is with the painting of manners of the present. The past is interesting not only by reason of the beauty which could be distilled from it by those artists for whom it was the present, but also precisely because it is the past, for its historical value. It is the same with the present. The pleasure which we derive from the representation of the present is due not only to the beauty with which it can be invested, but also to its essential quality of being present
Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past.
I don't much like post-modernism, because post-modernist has become the basket in which every mediocre person can shuffle things and pretend to do something significant, and we could also mention who use post-modernism in this way - maybe we shouldn't.
To me, living in the present means being aware of your conscious choice to focus on the past, present or future - it is not necessarily having to focus on the present.
How often are you worrying about the present moment? The present moment is usually all right. If you're worrying, you're either agonizing over the past which you should have forgotten long ago, or else you're apprehensive over the future which hasn't even come yet. We tend to skip over the present moment which is the only moment God gives any of us to live.
If you are hired to shake up the system, do it. No one will believe you're the boss until you do one or more of the following: 1. Add a new division; 2. Lop off a present department; 3. Add new people or reassign and reward present employees; 4. Get rid of deadwood; 5. Change the method of accounting; 6. Change lawyers, accountants, or other outside services; 7. Ask a lot of questions, and demand answers by a certain date; 8. Get in touch with key people in your industry or city and arrange personal meetings; 9. Improve working conditions; 10. Update present benefit plans.
The past is a distraction, a source of envy, enmity, bitterness. Only the present matters, for only in the present can we shape the future. Cut loose the past; it is dead weight. Let the Extirpation continue. Let it never end.
I think women in our global patriarchal culture are told to shut their body down. And when we don't know why, we start to cut our body off. You cut off your curves. You cut off your breasts. You cut off the curve of your tush. You cut off your sexuality... and it's relegated to the bedroom.
The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.
Cut off my head, and singular I am, Cut off my tail, and plural I appear; Although my middle's left, there's nothing there! What is my head cut off? A sounding sea; What is my tail cut off? A rushing river; And in their mingling depths I fearless play, Parent of sweetest sounds, yet mute forever.
In the spiritual world there are no time divisions such as the past, present and future; for they have contracted themselves into a single moment of the present where life quivers in its true sense. The past and the future are both rolled up in this present moment of illumination, and this present moment is not something standing still with all its contents, for it ceaselessly moves on.
Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.
The function off the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.
We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; we always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better.... or else we think about the future, about what we're going to do.... But at this precise moment, you also realize that you can change your future by bringing the past into the present. Past and future only exist in our mind. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity.... It isn't what you did in the past the will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
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