In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened. We are continually called upon to have feelings - about genocide, for instance, or about famine or the blowing up of passenger planes - and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately. A guilty consciousness of emotional inadequacy or impotence makes people doubt their own human weight.

Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.

Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he…

Apparently the rise of consciousness is linked to certain kinds of privation. It is the bitterness of self-consciousness that we knowers know best. Critical of…

'We are Fragile, everyone. We all long for something more. Things are said and things are done and the pieces hit the floor. See how fragile.'

Life is not a thing of knowing only - nay, mere knowledge has properly no place at all save as it becomes the handmaiden of feeling and emotion.

1. Laughter is the Wild Body's song of triumph. 2. Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously. 3. Laughter is the b…