“It is passivity that dulls feeling.”

— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

Source: Regarding the Pain of Others

Last update June 9, 2022. History

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Susan Sontag168

American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist 1933–2004

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“That passivity was the essence of the problem. The human being was intended to be passive only in a condition of fatigue, and not always then. Too much passivity of body produced surplus fat, short-windedness, indigestion: passivity of mind produced the same symptoms on the mental level. a feeling of spiritual dyspepsia. Since the average human being has no purposes that are not connected with the activities of keeping alive, the black room was bound to produce passivity, increasing dullness, a state in which the mind is at once awake and static, motionless, stagnant. This sense of dullness was nothing less than the collapse of the sense of reality and of values, the retreat into one's inner world.”

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Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895) German jurist, writer and pioneer of LGBT human rights

perhaps a passive magnetism as well, but at least an active is there
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