The groans of lovers as they make love are more real than the greatest lyric poetry ever written. But they cannot be preserved. Art is not a means of pickling. […] What separates my hands when working from my direct experience of my subject is not a barrier in space like a curtain. It is more like a barrier in time. Between the idea I have and the work I produce, there is the same difference as between my action yesterday and its final consequence tomorrow. Intentions, good or bad, are no more important in art than in life. Any action is judged by its consequences.

∆ John Berger, A Painter of Our Time: A Novel

"The diversity of modern culture is unequivocally a good thing. But that comes at the cost of more fragmentation, the loss of a cohesive cultural language. And that fragmentation can be interpreted in different ways. Maybe instead of reading The New York Times, you now read Breitbart or subscribe to a Substack: that could be celebrated as more personalized, individualistic, gatekeeper-less media; or it could mean that you’ve sequestered yourself in your own algorithmic echo chamber, exposed only to the people and ideas that reinforce your own worldview. Both can be true." (Rex Woodbury)