OU blog

Personal Blogs

Design Museum

New blog post

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Wednesday, 11 Aug 2010, 13:56

...............................................................................................

‘The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow. It eliminates the vice of procrastination, failed communications, failed communions. This thought has made me more and more attentive to all encounters, meetings, introductions which might contain the seed of depth that might be carelessly overlooked. This feeling has become a rarity, and rarer every day now that we have reached a hastier and more superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a great amount of people, more people, more countries. This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us. The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision.

Nin (1946)

...............................................................................................

My obsession of the last decade has been my life on-line. My life in words. My life with people I have never met and will never meet.

I found the above in a journal entry I wrote in 1992; I am regurgitating it on-line, in bite-size form, elsewhere - the 2,000 words or more I would write not right for this on-line sheet of OU soft paper on a roll that tears about where people get bored with my say and want to get a word in edge ways.

.................................................................................................

REFERENCE

Nin, A. (1946) Vol 4, Journals, May 1946.

................................................................................................

So here's the edge of the paper -

Permalink
Share post

Comments

Lucy Hollingworth

thoughts about this

My brother died five years ago at the age of 49.  It is the single biggest thing affecting my life now.  I realised that I might not be here tomorrow and people I relate to might not be here.  It has changed every smallest detail of my life.

I am working on an assignment about the study of the voice.  I have just been reading an article about how people look for the body, the person, in the recorded voice.  There is a concept coined by Roland Barthes called 'grain',  the ‘grain’ being ‘the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs’ (Barthes in Young 2006, 83).

Technology changes all sorts of things but it does not fundamentally change us humans.  We keep trying to relate, whatever the medium.  But face to face is always the best, because we are experts at reading the signs of the physical body.

Young, M. 2006. Latent Body—Plastic, Malleable,Inscribed: The Human Voice,the Body and the Sound of its Transformation through Technology, Contemporary Music Review, 25:1/2, 81-92

Design Museum

New comment

Lucy thanks for this I'll take a look.
Design Museum

New comment

Courtesy of the OU library and fuelled my curiosity and my respect for anyone who goes to the trouble of recommending a good read, I now have the article as a PDF.

Thanks!