But one might have just as much right to say that nobody ought to go to concerts, or visit the theatre, or enjoy any other kind of amusement as long as there are places of punishment in the world with unhappy prisoners in them. This is of course asking too much; for if anyone were to postpone contentment until he were to find no more poverty or misery anywhere, then he would be waiting until the impenetrable end of all time, and until the gray, ice-cold empty end of the world, and by then all joie de vivre would in all probability be utterly gone from him.
"At the end of the tunnel, more tunnel."
"In the darkness of the storm, a ray of darkness."
...
“One day your employees start complaining about insomnia. Many of them call in sick. Those who do show up wear gloves in the office and never remove them. Why? You ask. They don’t respond. Show me your hands, you say. They refuse to show you. You physically force your secretary to remove her gloves. The gloves are filled with blood. You run her hands under the faucet. When the blood drains away, you can see identical cuts on both her palms. The cuts are in the shape of a cross... She has received the stigmata.”
“The stigmata?”
“The stigmata. You see, your secretary is one of the chosen ones.”
“Chosen? For what?”
“You wake up next morning to the sound of a trumpet call. The sun is turning black, like a rotten lemon. At the northern end of Broadway, seven horses appear in the middle of the avenue. They are as white as ivory. Astride the beasts are horsemen cloaked up to their eyes in dark garments. The horses begin to march downtown.
“The East River has turned to blood. The Harlem into blood. The Hudson – also blood. Blood spurts out of the tap. There is a red ring around the shower drain. Blood comes out of there too... The Blood is thick and dark, almost black. It clots the pipes. Plants and crops start to wither. People raid supermarkets for bottled water. When that runs out, they start drinking the blood. The blood is nothing like normal blood. It tastes awful.”
“Zukor? Are you alright? Alec, is he alright?”
“This taste,” said Mitchell, “this is the taste of the future.”
Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not villains of our own stories.
... But a book suggests conversation: one person is speaking to another, and audible sound is, or should be, natural to that exchange. So I read aloud with myself as the audience, and gave voice to another's words.
... It is dangerous to live in a secure world.
... I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.
... Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people’s stories, insofar as those stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic. Who, in the age of television, hasn’t stood in front of a mirror and imagined his life as a show that is already perhaps being watched by multitudes? Who has not, with this consideration in mind, brought something performative into his everyday life? We have the ability to do both good and evil, and more often than not, we choose the good. When we don’t, neither we nor our imagined audience is troubled, because we are able to articulate ourselves to ourselves, and because we have through our other decisions, merited their sympathy. They are ready to believe the best about us, and not without good reason.
The technique of removing redundant data in a file is called compression. The technique of using a model of a listener to remove additional data is a special kind of “lossy” compression called perceptual coding. Because it uses both kinds of compression, the MP3 carries within it practical and philosophical understandings of what it means to communicate, what it means to listen or speak, how the mind’s ear works, and what it means to make music. Encoded in every MP3 are whole worlds of possible and impossible sound and whole histories of sonic practices... But MP3 encoders build their files by calculating a moment- to- moment relationship between the changing contents of a recording and the gaps and absences of an imagined listener at the other end. The MP3 encoder works so well because it guesses that its imagined auditor is an imperfect listener, in less-than-ideal conditions. It often guesses right.
