Debbie Foster

Trapped in the past or future in the DMN, you’re likely to abandon projects you once started with enthusiasm, make careless mistakes, or, worse, fall into a state of misery and despair, for no good reason whatsoever.

The question is how to feel about everything, about the whole of existence and the place of humankind within it

The specious present is where subconsciousness shades into consciousness. Our subconscious handles basic perception and quick, direct responses. Anything longer engages the conscious mind.

J. B. Priestley, in a 1964 book on precognition and related questions called Man & Time, acknowledges that we cannot help but be biased in one direction or the other: “either we want life to be tidy, clear, fully understood, contained within definite limits, or we long for it to seem larger, wilder, stranger. Faced with some odd incident, eithe

what makes fascist art uniquely frightening is that fascism itself can be described as a kind of factionalizing tendency, deliberately co-locating itself inside categories of thinking and feeling more normally reserved for literature and art. Fascism operates at the level of story; it works like a story, with violent heroes and monstrous villains.

Place your warm hand on your cool belly. Does your belly feel the warm or does your hand feel the cool? This, I think, is one of the fundamental mysteries.

[C]onventions of self-consciousness and inward scrutinizing [were] not common much before the Renaissance and not highly developed until people in the later eighteenth century became obsessed with “personality.” Paul Fussell The Norton Book of Travel

In learning to drive, walk, see or talk, in our very being, we are a massive interpenetrating collection of paths and routines worn by repetition; we are each a landscape, shaped by recurring patterns of force and formed by desire.

Yet the difference between “passing the time” and “time well spent” depends on making smart decisions about what to attend to in matters large and small, then doing so as if your life depended on it. As far as its quality is concerned, it does.