Citations de la semaine #1

No matter how far wrong you’ve come, you can always turn around
(Bill Callahan, I’m New Here, via Austin Kleon)


Si on a les proches qu’on mérite, tu es sans doute une meilleure personne que tu ne le crois.” 
(Erwan Lahrer, Le livre que je ne voulais pas écrire, p. 200)

Je me résous à ne plus écrire de messages comme on tente d’attraper la main de quelqu’un dans le noir.” 
(Erwan Lahrer, Le livre que je ne voulais pas écrire, p. 223)


“In Darkness Visible, the memoir of his own depression, William Styron has provided definitive descriptions of such a condition. He writes about its essence as a tormenting sense of pain “... most closely connected to drowning or suffocation - but even these images are off the mark.” But he does not miss the description of the accompanying state of his cognitive processes : “Rational thought was usually absent from my mind at such times, hence trance. I can think of no more apposite word for this state of being, a condition of helpless stupor in which cognition was replaced by that “positive and active anguish.” (Positive and active anguish were the terms used by William James to describe his own depression.)
(Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error)

Why complicate matters and bring consciousness into this process, if there is already a means to respond adaptively at an automated level ? The answer is that consciousness buys an enlarged protection policy. Consider this : If you come to know that animal or object or situation X causes fear, you will have two ways of behaving toward X. The first way is innate; you do not control it. Moreover, it is not specific to X; a large number of creatures, objects and circumstances can cause the response. The second way is base on your own experience and is specific to X. Knowing about X allows you to think ahead and predict the probability of its being present in a given environment, so that you can avoid X, preemptively, rather than just have to react to its presence in an emergency.
But there are other advantages of “feeling” your emotional reactions. You can generalize your knowledge, and decide, for example, to be cautious with anything that looks like X. (Of course, if you overgeneralize and behave overcautiously, you may become phobic-which is not so good.) (...) In short, feeling your emotional states, which is to say being cautious of emotions, offers you
flexibility of response based on the particular history of your interactions with the environment.”
(Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error)

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