"Music can be a more satisfying cerebral experience if we let it move us physically. When we hear a chord we like in works by Sibelius or Mahler, our brains want to shout out “Yeah!” When an orchestra builds the timbral mass in Ravel’s “Bolero,” we want to break out of our seats and dance and show how good it feels. Stand up, sit down, shout, let it all out. As the managers of Lincoln Center contemplate renovations, I say rip out some of the seats and give us room to move."

-- Daniel J. Levitin, "Dancing in the Seats", The New York Times

"Now, you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.

"I have relinquished control over my decisions to the universal mind. I have fused with the knowledge of the cybersphere, and entered the bliss of a higher metaphysic. As John Steinbeck nearly wrote, a fella ain’t got a mind of his own, just a little piece of the big mind — one mind that belongs to everybody. Then it don’t matter, Ma. I’ll be everywhere, around in the dark. Wherever there is a network, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a TiVo machine making a sitcom recommendation based on past preferences, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a Times reader selecting articles based on the most e-mailed list, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way Amazon links purchasing Dostoyevsky to purchasing garden furniture. And when memes are spreading, and humiliation videos are shared on Facebook — I’ll be there, too.

"I am one with the external mind. Om."

-- David Brooks, "The Outsourced Brain", The New York Times

Osaka, Japan

"The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them."

-- Michel Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?", The Foucault Reader

"The world is too complex, the Burkean conservative believes, for rapid reform. Existing arrangements contain latent functions that can be neither seen nor replaced by the reformer. The temperamental conservative prizes epistemological modesty, the awareness of the limitations on what we do and can know, what we can and cannot plan."

-- David Brooks, "The Republican Collapse", The New York Times

Hong Kong

"In what sense are my sensations private? -- Well, only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it. -- In one way this is false, and in another way nonsense. If we are using the word 'to know' as it is normally used (and how else are we to use it?), then other people very often know when I am in pain. -- Yes, but all the same not with the certainty that I know it myself! -- It can't be said of me at all (except as a joke) that I know I am in pain. What is it supposed to mean -- except perhaps that I am in pain?"

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

"If Sal Paradise were alive today, he’d be a product of the new rules. He’d be a grad student with an interest in power yoga, on the road to the M.L.A. convention with a documentary about a politically engaged Manitoban dance troop that he hopes will win a MacArthur grant. He’d be driving a Prius, going a conscientious 55, wearing a seat belt and calling Mom from the Comfort Inns.

"The only thing we know for sure is that this ethos won’t last. Someday some hypermanic kid will produce a moronically maxed-out adventure odyssey that will spark the overdue rebellion among all the over-pressured SAT grinds, and us grumpy midlife critics will get to witness a new Kerouac, and the greatest pent-up young-life crisis in the history of the world."

-- David Brooks, "Sal Paradise at 50", The New York Times