Finite and Infinite Games

If no amount of veiling can conceal the veiling itself, the issue is how far we will go in our seriousness at self-veiling, and how far we will go to have others act in complicity with us.

Seductions are designed to come to an end. Time runs out. The play is finished. All that remains is recollection, the memory of a moment, and perhaps a longing for its repetition. Seductions cannot be repeated.

The infinite player in us does not consume time but generates it. Because infinite play is dramatic and has no scripted conclusion, its time is time lived and not time viewed.

A culture is sometimes opposed by suppressing its ideas, its works, even its language. This is a common strategy of a society afraid of the culture growing within its boundaries. But it is a strategy certain to fail, because it confuses the creative activity (poiesis) with the product (poiema) of that activity.

Evil is not the acquisition of power, but the expression of power. It is the forced recognition of a title—and therein lies the contradiction of evil, for recognition cannot be forced. The Nazis did not compete with the Jews for a title, but demanded recognition of a title without competition.

In a matter of months we can cut down a rain forest that took tens of thousands of years to grow, but we are helpless in repulsing the desert that takes its place. And the desert, of course, is no less natural than the forest.

Because we make use of machinery in the belief we can increase the range of our freedom, and instead only decrease it, we use machines against ourselves.

With each surprise, the past reveals a new beginning in itself. Inasmuch as the future is always surprising, the past is always changing.

Of course, immortality of the soul—the bare soul, cleansed of any personality traces—is rarely what is desired in the yearning for immortality.