[Video: introduction to The Present, a Kickstarter project to produce a clock which takes a whole year to complete a cycle. The clock will mark the passage of time by subtle changes in the background hue to which the clock’s single hand — a “season hand”? — points.]
From whiskey river’s commonplace book:
Do you really believe that the sciences would ever have originated and grown if the way had not been prepared by magicians, alchemists, astrologers and witches whose promises and pretensions first had to create a thirst, a hunger, a taste for hidden and forbidden powers? Indeed, infinitely more had to be promised than could ever be fulfilled in order that anything at all might be fulfilled in the realms of knowledge.
(Friedrich Nietzsche)
…and:
Now there is present in the world at the moment, or at least I like to think so, an impulse which I have named the archaic revival. What happens is that whenever a society really gets in trouble, and you can use this in your own life — when you really get in trouble — what you should do is say “what did I believe in the last sane moments that I experienced” and then go back to that moment and act from it even if you no longer believe it.
(Terence McKenna)
…and:
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
(Philip K. Dick)
