Juvenile Books

“Idle, archaic, indifferent mentality. I am beginning to feel I might give all this up, as if the challenge were not worth the trouble, might give up all judgement. This state of mind has been with me from childhood, from adolescence - a lack lustre, slipshod, idle, irresponsible, uncultivated, undesiring state. These books, did they ever interest me? These women, did I ever feel any emotion for them? All these different countries, did I want to discover them? Only the inhumanity of things has affected me, and I have in fact been unable to bring this into my own life. I read this verdict in the graph of the tonality of events, of the melancholy of faces, of the vanity and futility of our undertakings. I am still astonished by the mirror we can offer to others, by the loving or ironic image which we still are sometimes in each others' mirrors.

Increasingly, it is machines, not people, who get nervous. People only become nervous if they force themselves to look like machines.

All situations where you have to make a choice come down to this: do you prefer a woman with a very ordinary body but an attractive face, or one whose body is attractive, but whose face is nothing special? The problem is a false one. It is always preferable to be in a situation where there is no choice to be made either because the woman is perfect, or because she is the only one available.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories