Flaker of Flints

One reason for the interest in phase transitions is scale invariance: the fluctuations that exist near the critical point occur on all possible length and time scales. A second reason for our interest is called universality: the striking similarity in behavior near the critical point among systems that are quite different from each other far from the critical point.... How can correlations actually extend an infinite distance away, without requiring a series of amplification stations all along the way? We can understand such “infinite-range propagation” as arising from the huge multiplicity of interaction paths that connect two atoms in dimensions greater than one. (In one dimension, there is no multiplicity of interaction paths, and atoms become aligned only at absolute zero temperature.)

I am not equal to my longing. Somewhere there should be a place the exact shape of my emptiness— there should be a place responsible for taking one back.

They still call themselves the intelligentsia. Writers! Scientists! They don't believe in anything. Their capacity for faith has atrophied through lack of use. My God, what kind of people are they? Their eyes are blank. They're thinking how not to sell themselves cheap, how to get paid for every breath they take. They know they were born to "be someone," to be an elite! They say, "You live but once." How can such people believe in anything at all?

I got a feeling I can't describe: I see this place when I close my eyes. Wake me up if we ever arrive. And tell me how did we, How did we get here?

I'm connected in a daze, Roam unconscious disengaged. In a simulated world I sustain. Swimming senseless through a void, Ease my appetite with noise. In a stimulated world Go insane. Shadow in a matrix, Searching for a light. Captive of the jungle, Hiding in the night. Break me free to live enchanted. Enchanted, Beyond control. Hide me, hide me. Hide me in your mystery. Break me free to live enchanted. Enchanted, Beyond control.

Moloch is introduced as the answer to a question – C. S. Lewis’ question in Hierarchy Of Philosophers – what does it? Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination? And Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it.

The single individual is higher than the universal.

...But for a few years he had been visited by the Muse (I know of no poet to whom this hackneyed metaphor is better applicable) and thenceforth was a haunted man; for anyone who has ever been visited by the Muse is thenceforth haunted....Sometimes, however, to be a ‘ruined man’ is itself a vocation...

...[Coleridge] once believed he could grasp the truth of things in his pantheistic ecstasies; in the daemonic poems ecstasy is still a reality, but the possibility is raised of it being profoundly misleading....Coleridge is not just afraid of loss of self in ecstasy, he is afraid of hallucination, of being wrong...

...In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence...