Deus le volt!

Everyone who took part in the Crusade wore a cross sewn on to his outer garment - the first badge worn by an army in post-Classical times and the first step towards modern military uniforms; but whereas for the knights this cross was a symbol of Christian victory in a military expedition of limited duration, the poor thought rather of the sentence: 'Take up the Cross and follow me!' For them the Crusade was above all a collective imitato Christi, a mass sacrifice which was to be rewarded by a mass apotheosis at Jerusalem.

Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium 64

And if the wind is accompanied by rain!

Sometimes the wind directs, dominates, and gives its own rhythm to the roar of water, flinging it violently against walls, windows, and panes. Sometimes instead, it seems that the rain is waiting for the pauses of the wind, then to fall quietly and perpendicularly. At these times, the metallic timbres of roofs and gutters dominate, and the monotonous one of the earth, why a rhythm that is only the rhythm of the rain but still has all the crescendi and diminuendi of intensity through the greater or lesser amount of water falling.

When the rain falls in large, single drops, the general pitch that results is low. When instead it falls in quantity, the noise of the rain is much higher as a general pitch. This explains why the rain is so well attuned to the wind. Indeed, when the wind whistles high and persistently and causes the water to strike with greater force, this clearly raises its pitch, as if to accord with the wind that dominates and directs it. Then, when the wind has stopped momentarily, it resumes its normal, lower pitch.

Russolo, "The Noise of Nature and Life," The Art of Noises 42

This assertion is false.

We will call young any individual, no matter what his age, who does not yet coincide with his function, who acts and struggles to attain the realm of activity he truly desires, who fights to achieve a career in terms of a situation and a form of work other than that which has been planned for him . . . . Any reform must begin with the millions of "pre-agents" who collectively comprise the "sickness of society." So long as youth suffers in slavery, or is super-exploited by the seniority system, it will hurl itself into all the warlike follies and all the banalities which are permitted it as a compensation for it sown non-existence. Those who know and love their pplaces, whether proletarians or capitalists, are passive, because they don't want to compromise themselves by appearing in the streets. They have goods and children to protect! The young, who have nothing to lose, are the attack - indeed, they are adventure. Let youth cease to serve as a commodity merely to become the consumer of its own elan.

Isou, "Youth Uprising"

Some blamed the commune on art.

In a book about movements in culture that raised no monuments, about movements that barely left a trace - movements that cannot be refuted by "Ozymandias" because they were ephemeral from beginning to end - making life more interesting is the only standard of judgment that can justify the pages they can fill.

Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces 148

He looked round.

A good many of the nicest men he knew were like himself, bound in by their own virginity, which they could not break out of. They were so sensitive to their women that they would go without them for ever rather than do them a hurt, an injustice. Being the sons of mothers whose husbands had blundered rather brutally through their feminine sanctities, they were themselves too diffident and shy. They could easier deny themselves than incur any reproach from a woman: for a woman was like their mother, and they were full of the sense of their mother. They preferred themselves to suffer the misery of celibacy, rather than risk the other person.

Lawrence, Sons and Lovers 299

the trees will sprout

It is not the freedom of choice

Take Franz Kline. There is no "plastic experience." We don't stand back and behold the "painting." There is no "painting" in the ordinary sense, just as there is no "painting," for that matter, in Piero della Francesca or Rembrandt. There is nothing but the integrity of the creative act. Any detail of the work is sufficient to establish this. The fact that these details accumulate and make what is known as a work of art proves nothing. What else should an artist do with his time?

Feldman, Essays 78

L'industrie phonographique aux Etats-Unis

In my article of twelve years ago I enumerated among the uses to which the phonograph would be applied: 1. Letter-writing and all kinds of dictation, without the aid of a stenographer. 2. Phonographic books, which would speak to the blind people without effort on their part. 3. The teaching of elocution. 4. Reproduction of music. 5. The "Family Record," a registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by members of a family, in their own voices: and of the last words of dying persons. 6. Music boxes and toys. 7. Clocks that should announce, in articulate speech, the time for going home, going to meals, etc. 8. The preservation of languages, by exact reproduction of the manner of pronouncing. 9. Educational purposes: such as preserving the explanations made by a teacher, so that the pupil can refer to them at any moment; and spelling or other lessons placed upon the phonograph for convenience in committing to memory. 10. Connection with the telephone, so as to make that invention an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting conversations.

(1890)

Edison, The Phonogram 1: 1-3