Animals and Other Humans

Animals are more truly amused by tv than any human being I know. They intuitively realise that what they see there are just human beings forming colourful patterns by going through the motions. Whereas human beings can’t help looking to tv for signs of a reality beyond tv that is either not there in any sense or that tv itself induces to purport to exist.

The heavenly dispensation represented by the reign of communications technology will be a paradise indistinguishable at times from a devilish conspiracy to keep our dear ones at a distance, to garble their words of encouragement, to blur and invert their looks of longing, warmth and love, to translate their deeds into gestures and their gestures into signs of problems.

Most men and women who once acted with a degree of social or intellectual independence nowadays have to be their own secretaries. Which means they have to do the bidding of super-secretaries from marketing and accounts. The latter don't wield power absolutely, they wield it super-absolutely, transcendentally - in such a way that its cruelties, irrationalities and inanities appear to happen of their own accord.