The bottom of my soul has such depth;
Neither joy nor the waves of sorrow can reach it
—Nishida Kitarō, 1958
The Jewish tradition is not optimistic about human nature but it is stubbornly, insistently possibilistic.
—Shai Held, Judaism Is About Love, 2024, read on Rosh Hashana
People have been saying for some time that we may be beginning to take leave of literature and to anticipate an illiterate culture.
What will that culture look like? Spoken language will invade the scene day and night from speakers, TV screens, and computer terminals. In this it probably won’t be very different from what it was before the invention of letters. This won’t matter, however, for language, although omnipresent, will no longer be at the center of culture, but will form a sort of noisy background. New dimensions of thought will develop, profoundly changing not only ideas but action. Poetic thought and mathematics will merge in a way that we are as yet unable fully to appreciate, although we can already observe the first results of the merger in synthetic imagery and music. Our children’s lives will be as different from ours as ours is different from pre-historical life. And our children’s children probably won’t feel the absence of literature as a great loss. It’s different for us, who fear that the letter, this most precious heritage entrusted to us by our ancestors, will lose its splendor. Those still committed to the writing of letters, despite their belief in the futility of that commitment, may feel that with the loss of this remarkable cultural object life will lose much of its attraction. For them, scribere necesse est, vivere non est [writing is necessary, living is not]. Our children’s children may think that with the defeat of the cumbersome code of the letter, new horizons of thought were opened. Many of us will feel that in taking leave of literature, we are taking leave of many of the most noble values with which we identify ourselves.
—Vilém Flusser, “What Comes After Z,” Artforum, 1987
We can no longer think of the artist as a sort of demiurge bringing raw matter to life, for the simple reason that raw matter no longer exists. We now know that matter is intelligent, down to the tiniest Higgs boson.
—Giorgio Griffa, Paths Through the Forest (2025)