
On Woody Allen, in an interview with Roger Ebert in Esquire magazine (7 March 1972) http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19720307/PEOPLE/41116001
Source: Letters to a Young Contrarian
On Woody Allen, in an interview with Roger Ebert in Esquire magazine (7 March 1972) http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19720307/PEOPLE/41116001
Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Rape and Modern Sex War, p. 68
Context: I am saying that many of the problems between the sexes are coming from something prior to socialization, a turbulence that has to do with every boy’s origin in a woman’s body, and the way he is overwhelmed by this huge, matriarchal shadow of a goddess figure from his childhood. And I feel, after so many decades of studying this, that men are suffering from a sense of dependence on women, their sense that at any moment they could be returned to that slavery and servitude they experienced under a woman’s thumb, when they were a boy in the shadow of the mother. I got this from studying all world culture, and comparing and noticing how often there were these similar patterns in many different cultures. Many things that erupt in rape or violence, or battery and so on, are happening when a woman is pushing that button of fear and dependency.
“For Spinoza, philosophy originates in the very personal… feeling of emptiness”
Context: For Spinoza, philosophy originates in the very personal... feeling of emptiness that in the philosophical tradition has earned the distinguished name of contemptu mundi, the contempt for worldly things, or, better, vanitas.... Spinoza says that... success in life is just a postponement of failure;... pleasure is just a fleeting respite from pain; and... the objects of our striving are vain illusions....
The feeling of vanitas Spinoza describes is... a dire encounter with the prospect of descent into absolute nothingness, a life without significance coming to a meaningless end.... The experience Spinoza records... establishes... the moment of extreme doubt, fear, and uncertainty that precedes the dawn of revelation.... the journey... is one trodden by poets, philosophers, and theologians too numerous to mention, who for millennia have recorded this feeling that life is a useless passion, a wheel of ceaseless striving, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, and so on.<!--pp. 55-56
Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic (2006)