Daily Painting

Christopher R. W. Nevinson
ANY WINTERY AFTERNOON IN ENGLAND (1930)

Daily Painting

Cedric Morris
POUND FARM (1930)

Daily Painting

Ohara Koson
EVENING SAIL BOATS (1930)

Daily Painting

Luigi Lucioni
VERMONT FARM SCENE (c. 1930)

Daily Painting

Paul Klee
OR THE MOCKED MOCKER

Daily Painting

Vilho Lampi
DANCE ON THE BRIDGE (1930)

Daily Painting

Charles Burchfield
WINTER TWILIGHT (1930)

SIGMUND FREUD

Civilization and Its Discontents

This aesthetic attitude to the goal of life offers little protection against the threat of suffering, but it can compensate tor a great deal. The enjoyment of beauty has a peculiar, mildly intoxicating quality of feeling. Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.

Playing

The Boswell Sisters
THE BOSWELL SISTERS COLLECTION 1925-1936

OLAF STAPLEDON
Last and First Men

Somehow, then, I must help you to feel not only the vastness of time and space, but also the vast diversity of mind's possible modes. But this I can only hint to you, since so much lies wholly beyond the range of your imagination.

OLAF STAPLEDON
Last and Future Men

Even the preceding and touch longer period between the first mammal and the first man, some twenty-five millions of terrestrial years, seems now inconsiderable.

The whole of it, together with the age of the First Men, may be said to lie halfway between the formation of the planets, two thousand million years earlier, and their final destruction, two thousand million years later,

Taking a still wider view, we see that this aeon of four thousand million years is itself no more than a moment in comparison with the sun's age. And before the birth of the sun the stuff of this galaxy had already endured for aeons as a nebula. Yet even those aeons look brief in relation to the passage of time before the myriad great nebula themselves, the future galaxies, condensed out of the all-pervading mist in the beginning.

Thus the whole duration of humanity, with its many sequent species and its incessant downpour of generations, is but a flash in the lifetime of the cosmos.

OLAF STAPLEDON
Last and First Men

There used to be a saying “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” But as the world became networked first through newspapers, then radio, television, and then the Internet mass neurosis spread more and more rapidly until a generation into the internet the average neurosis level of young adults was the same as mental patients had been in their grandparents time. 

The popular consensus was that knowledge was available for all, but the trade-off had become that intellectual rigour was lost and all knowledge regardless of veracity become regarded as the same worth. What was more, in the West a concept came about that knowledge should be free. This rapidly eliminated the resources which would have allow talented individuals to generate intellectual property rather than be wage slaves. The anti-intellectual trend which stemmed from the origins of universal free education expanded and insulting terms were applied to intellectuals confabulating intelligence and knowledge with poor social skills and inadequate emotional development. 

While this was attractive to the masses who felt that everyone had a right to equal intelligence and that any tests purporting to show differences were by definition false this offset any benefits that broader access to knowledge might have brought deterring many of the more able from high levels of attainment in a purely intellectual sphere. Combined with a belief that internalization of knowledge was no longer necessary – that it was all there on the Internet reduced the possible impact substantially as ideas on an external network could never cross pollinate and form a network of concepts in the minds of those whose primary skill was to search rather than to link concepts already internalized.

OLAF STAPLEDON
Last and First Men

There is much in this vision that will remind you of your mystics; yet between them and us there is far more difference than similarity, in respect both of the matter and the manner of our thought. For while they are confident that the cosmos is perfect, we are sure only that it is very beautiful. While they pass to their conclusion without the aid of intellect, we have used that staff every step of the way. Thus, even when in respect of conclusions we agree with your mystics rather than your plodding intellectuals, in respect of method we applaud most your intellectuals; for they scorned to deceive themselves with comfortable fantasies.

Currently Reading

Olaf Stapledon
LAST AND FIRST MEN

OLAF STAPLEDON
Last and First Men

The whole of American life was organized around the cult of the powerful individual, that phantom ideal which Europe herself had only begun to outgrow in her last phase.

Those Americans who wholly failed to realize this ideal, who remained at the bottom of the social ladder, either consoled themselves with hopes for the future, or stole symbolical satisfaction by identifying themselves with some popular star, or gloated upon their American citizenship, and applauded the arrogant foreign policy of their government.

Those who achieved power were satisfied so long as they could merely retain it, and advertise it uncritically in the conventionally self-assertive manners.

Currently Watching

LAST AND FIRST MEN
Jóhann Jóhannsson
Iceland, 2020

Currently Watching

MOROCCO
Josef von Sternberg
USA, 1930

Daily Painting

Max Beckmann
THE BATH (1930)

Daily Painting
[Self-portrait Edition]

Carel Weight

SELF-PORTRAIT (1930)