Welcome to Litsy!

This is a weird and weighty book, which is probably why I liked it. Peters writes like I think - making connections that might seem odd on the surface (clouds, cetaceans, libraries, google, God, writing, clocks, calendars, weather, climate, Heidegger, McLuhan, and many lists), but reveal unexpected insights when you explore how they connect or overlap, compare and contrast.

“In Moby-Dick, Ishmael uses a coffin as a life buoy to survive the sinking of his ship. ‘Beauty, like order, occurs in many places in this world, but only as a local and temporary fight against the Niagara of increasing entropy.‘ Writing is a boat in which we launch ourselves over the falls, hoping it will protect us while we drop.”

“It is strange to be looking down at clouds and weather patterns from a position that defies traditional embodied experience, but perhaps even stranger to hear science, the bastion of demystifying rationality, discovering artful images in the clouds after two millennia of proscription. This is some kind of cultural historical mutation: not only is it legitimate to look for images in clouds, but it has become urgent.”

“Millennia of astronomical mimicry enforced by cultural discipline might have reinforced a preference for the right among northern hemispheric humans as they stared at the sky, the spin of the stars, the rise and set of the sun, and the tides of the moon.”

“Apparatus is the precondition, not the corruption, of the world...That is, more or less: Whatever alters the relation of human beings to the signifier in the slightest way changes the course of their history by modifying the moorings of their being. If history is the history of apparently inconspicuous transformations in our relations to the signifier, media history becomes the key to history in general.”

“Media studies can be a form of philosophical anthropology, of asking the question with which Socrates stumped Alcibiades: What is a human being? I am also stumped, but I offer one answer in the next chapter: The human being is a creature sailing on many craft.”

“The mid-world is best.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson