The Shadow of the fourth leg is slightly off. The Feet of the table resemble legs of little animals, maybe deer; the sunlight on the edge of the windowsill. Why is that a likely response on anything?

He brought twenty images, in which he hid one that he was fond of. But he was not confident enough to put only the one image on the table. So he brought nineteen images to obfuscate what? The one image? That one image surely was not good enough and instead of that one, every other could have meant the same. So when it was not this one picture he was trying to hide: It was his lack of confidence into this one picture. And this lack of confidence into this one image was his lack of confidence, that looking at the world and bringing something home from it would get him anywhere. There really was nothing to see: He took all twenty images, placed them side by side on the table: They started contradicting themselves, weakening each other: Questionioning this view of the world, lamenting the views he had not chosen, asking in the line of: Wasn’t it more or less random? Is the world constructed in that taking of the initial images, which ultimately ends it being discarded as being insufficient, inconclusive, indecisive.

Any object, intensly regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eons of the gods.

— James Joyce, Ulysses, p. 545

— Robert Bresson, Notes sur le cinematographe

Unser größtes Unglück: Dass wir die Tiefe des Unglücks im Herzen unseres Nächsten nicht ermessen können. Unser größtes Glück: Dass wir die Tiefe des Unglücks in unserem eigenen Herzen nicht ermessen können.

Der Refrain aus einem Lied von Trenet kam ihm immer wieder in den Sinn, seit er es am Nachmittag auf der Autobahn im Radio gehört hatte, und er sagte sich, das “Foto, das alte Foto aus meiner Jugend”, von dem dort die Rede war, werde schon bald für die junge Generation keine Bedeutung mehr haben. Die Farben der Gegenwart für immer: Die Kamera als Tiefkühltruhe.

— Marc Augé, Nicht-Orte

Das aufgeräumte Zimmer, die Dinge an ihrem Platz oder so scheint es: Dabei haben die Dinge keinen Platz, kommen nur wie zufällig nebeneinander zu Liegen und schaffen ihre eigene Ruhe um sich herum, die ihnen den Anschein gibt, als wäre dies hier ihr angestammter Platz.

The ecological value of the term Nature is dangerously overrated, because Nature isn’t just a term – it’s something that happened to human-built space, demarcating human systems from Earth systems. Nature as such is a twelve-thousand-years old human product, geological as well as discursive. Its wavy elegance was eventually revealed as inherently contingent and violent, as when in a seizure one’s brain waves become smooth. Wash-rinse-repeat the agrilogistics and suddenly we reach a tipping point.

The Anthropocene doesn’t destroy Nature. The Anthropocene is Nature in its toxic nightmare form. Nature is the latent form of the Anthropocene waiting to emerge as a catastrophe.

–Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology