The Marvelous Clouds Quotes

“Schopenhauer remarked that buying books would be better if you could also buy the time to read them. Books are different from natural objects in that they can overwhelm us in a way that nature’s abundance rarely does. There has always been too much to know; the universe is thoroughly baffling. When we walk into a bookstore, it is easy to feel oppressed by the amount of knowledge on tap. Why don’t we have the same feeling in a forest, at the beach, in a big city, or simply in breathing? There is more going on in our body every second than we will ever understand, and yet we rarely feel bothered by our inability to know it all. Books, however, are designed to make demands on our attention and time: they hail us in ways that nature rarely does. A thing is what Heidegger calls zunichtsgedrängt, relaxed and bothered about nothing. A plant or stone is as self-sufficient as the Aristotelian god or Heidegger’s slacker things, but books are needy. They cry out for readers as devils hunger for souls.”
― John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media

“Books you have read share a deep ontological similarity with books you haven't: both can be profoundly fuzzy. At times books you haven't read shine more brightly than those you have, and often reading part of a book will shape your mind more decisively than reading all of it; there is no inherent epistemic superiority to having read a book or not having read it.”
― john durham peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media

“Media show up wherever we humans face the unamangeable mortality of our material existence: the melancholy facts that memory cannot hold up and body cannot last, that time is, at base, the merciless and generous habitat for humans and things. Media lift us out of time by providing a symbolic world that can store and process data, in the widest sense of that word.”
― John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media

“Media are not just pipes or channels. Media theory has something both ecological and existential to say. Media are more than the audiovisual and print institutions that strive to fill our empty seconds with programming and advertising stimulus; they are our condition, our fate, and our challenge. Without means there is no life. We are mediated by our bodies; by our dependence on oxygen; by the ancient history of life written into each of our cells; by upright posture, sexual pair bonding, and the domestication of plants and animals; by calendar-making and astronomy; by the printing press, the green revolution, and the Internet. We are not only surrounded by the history-rich artifacts of applied intelligence; we also are such artifacts. Culture is part of our natural history.”
― John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media

“The crossroads of humans and things defines the domain of media studies. We are conditioned by conditions we condition. We, the created creators, shape tools that shape us. We live by our crafts and conditions. It is hard to look them in the face.”
― John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media