Made whole again ... in time for the morning edition

The genius of the age is that of journalism.

Journalism throngs every rift and cranny of our consciousness. It does so because the press and the media are far more than a technical instrument and commercial enterprise. The root-phenomenology of the journalistic is, in a sense, metaphysical.

It articulates an epistemology and ethics of spurious temporality. Journalistic presentation generates a temporality of equivalent instantaneity.

All things are more or less of equal import; all are only daily.

Correspondingly, the content, the possible significance of the material which journalism communicates, is 'remaindered' the day after.

The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform. Political enormity and the circus, the leaps of science and those of the athlete, apocalypse and indigestion, are given the same edge.

Paradoxically, this monotone of graphic urgency anesthetizes. The utmost beauty or terror are shredded at close of day. We are made whole again, and expectant, in time for the morning edition.

-George Stiner, Real Presences

"She had a cat and she played the guitar. On days when the sun was strong she would wash her hair, and together with the cat, a red tiger-striped tom, sit out on the fire escape thumbing a guitar while her hair dried. Whenever I heard the music I would go stand quietly by my window. She played very well, and sometimes sang too. Sang in the hoarse, breaking tunes of a boy's adolescent voice."

-Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

The Boston Flat was that hypothetical solution to restless cafeteria days and boring Friday evenings. We would have plants in the windows and lots of bookshelves. We would be busy with our brownstone lives, walking to concerts and writing brilliant things all night.

Who knows where we would work, but that would be irrelevant, because we'd earn just enough to have a fire escape to sit on and a big red cat named Taj Mahal and we'd know how to play the guitar.