The “La Marseillaise” scene in Casablanca always made me cry a bit until a recent viewing, when I realized that here the transients of French Morocco sing on behalf of the colonizer France and French nationalism (that is, sing in colonized space), now Vichy’d via Nazi Germany. Depending on where you stand in
Rick’s Café Américain, you may find the colonizer singing, too.
There is no holding on in thin air. You have to advance step by step, and each step is a new illusion since it is not suspended freely in the air. If he who strives upward were to pause ever so slightly upon each step-be it ever so low-if he were to touch it only with the tips of his toes, then, at the moment of contact, he too would not be suspended freely; he too is chained to the language of this very moment, of this very step. And this would be true even if, for this moment, he had built language and step himself
Sound human understanding would necessarily have to learn that there are as many logics as there are languages with different structures.
Our civilization is characterized by the word ‘progress.’ Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features.
Via Bibliophilia: #OnThisDay in 1793, over a year after Mozart’s death, the completed Requiem received its first public performance
STEVEN WEXLER 