Core Topics

At man’s core there is a voice that wants him never to give in to fear. But if it is true that in general man cannot give in to fear, at the very least he postpones indefinitely the moment when he will have to confront himself with the object of his fear ... when he will no longer have the assistance of reason as guaranteed by God, or when he will no longer have the assistance of God such as reason guaranteed. It is necessary to recoil, but it is necessary to leap, and perhaps one only recoils in order to leap better.
—Georges Bataille (1897–1962)

Guided by emotion and empathy, working through ritual and repetition, television’s core vocabulary reflects its role as a therapeutic voice ministering to the open wounds of the psyche. As a “close-up” medium whose dramatic and social locus is the home, television addresses the inner life by minimizing the heroic while maximizing the private and personal aspects of existence. Where motion pictures favor the panoramic shot, tele vision privileges the zoom shot, looking in rather than out. To represent conversation, film directors use the “shot-counter-shot” effect while television directors employ the tightly constructed “two faces east.” Thus motion-picture conversation emphasizes the separations between people, while television depicts people as closely linked to one another.
—George Lipsitz, U.S. cultural critic, educator. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture, ch. 1, University of Minnesota Press (1990)

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)