Word: reader
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...religious conventions and the intensity of its expression. The second part, "Sentences," explores the way in which Thoreau's words work together to lead in into predictive conjecture. Their call to action challenges even our right passively to read them. "Portions," the third and final chapter, carries the reader from ". . . more or less formal question about the kind of book Walden is to matters more or less concerning its doctrine," that is, its philosophy. The progression is symbolized by the quote from Thoreau's letter which appears in thirds below the chapter titles: "On the first perusal plain common sense...
Eddington's quote recalls, through a single, coherent image, the entire enterprise in which Western philosophical discourse and literature have been involved since Descartes: the mapping of consciousness. And it is the reader who locates this inheritance, identifies the "tiny specks floating in a void" as truths, and jots them down. This could be interpreted. I suppose, as a variation on Benjamin's idea that a work should be written composed of quotations; except that no thought of "composing a work" ever occurs to the reader. Rather, quotations are the material out of which he constructs a mosaic depicting...
Esoteric works, Prague linguistics, the letters of Alban Berg, and forgotten masterpieces like Baudelaire's Pauvre Belgique are elevated to the level on indispensable texts; like letters discovered several decades after their author's death, which then prompt a revision of his life and work these documents compel the reader to reevaluate his library and his notebook, those two vessels of humane learning. In time, he realizes that what he has collected represents no more than a mere portion of what there is, and resolves to devote his labors to the subjective, to whatever mirrors and enhances his own suspicions...
...identifies taxonomies of natural phenomena which coincide with mine: Chicago, the lives of the Jewish urban intelligentsia, family sorrow; that in the journalistic, feuilleton-like reflections of literature collected in The Age of Enormity, a musuem of modern life has been opened where the meditations of a typical educated reader in our time await inspection; and that the stories. Alpha and Omega, reverberate with an awareness of that event which Benjamin defected in Leskov: "experience has fallen in value." It has become harder and harder to comprehend what happens to us, to claim significance; the leisured cultivation of consciousness...
...reader's library is this Book, his experience inside if the world...