“Now, all calls are local calls—the entire world is nearby.”
“Every relationship is a long-distance relationship.”
“Rilke (unmarried and childless) thought there was still hope for marriage: “But, once the realization is accepted that, even between the closest human beings, infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!””
“Teju Cole, thinking of his own relationship with W.G. Sebald, quotes Sebald: “Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, then one’s own precursor?””
“Walter Benjamin thought it was “the unique phenomenon of a distance” that conveyed such mystery, which he called aura. “If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.””
“Cézanne has that visual trick of painting a tree branch in the foreground that follows the curve, in the background, of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Look at the pine branch (in the wonderful Courtauld painting of circa 1887, for example) and it brings the mountain forward. Look at the mountain, and the branch recedes. “It’s not the eye that distinguishes distances,” Cézanne seems to be saying. “It’s the mind.””
“What Benjamin called the “decay of the aura” was, he believed, the result of our desire “to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly.… Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.””
“Distance, literally “standing apart,” comes from the Latin distantia, meaning “quarrel, estrangement, discord, strife”—a standoff.”
“A woman walks into a florist’s shop and asks if she can wire a key to her daughter. “Of course not,” says the florist. “But you can wire flowers, right?” says the woman. This was invoked in Stanley Cavell’s aesthetics seminar, circa 1980, but I’ve forgotten the context. Was it a joke? Or did it illustrate some fundamental philosophical insight?”
“In Cavell’s seminar, we had been reading Heidegger’s seductive essay “Building Dwelling Thinking.””
“At first, Heidegger gives a utilitarian description of what an old stone bridge does for the local economy. “The highway bridge is tied into the network of long-distance traffic, paced and calculated for maximum yield,” he writes.”
“But what really interests him is how it places things into relation as though for the first time. “It does not just connect banks that are already there….It brings stream and bank and land into each other’s neighborhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream.””
“This mysterious gathering of the landscape, which Cavell related to Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar,” involves a new concept of distance, not merely mathematical or utilitarian but somehow spiritual. “Yet every distance is not near” (Bob Dylan).”
“Critics used to pride themselves on “close reading.” Such reverent attention to word and phrasing in a few canonical texts is now thought by some to reek of religion. “At bottom, it’s a theological exercise—very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously,” writes Franco Moretti, a proponent of what has come to be known as Digital Humanities, “whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them.””
“Moretti invites us instead to practice “distant reading,” using computers to find patterns in vast collections of texts via computer data. “And if, between the very small and the very large, the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, less is more. If we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing something.””
“The tone of this, its festive mood of nihilistic comedy, is reminiscent of Wittgenstein. “Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.””
“Sometimes, as I’ve noted, the shortest path between two points is serpentine.”