This type of embarrassing discovery, in which something you thought was one thing is actually two things, and each of those two things is actually ten things, seems like a simple function of the duration and quality of one’s attention. With effort, we can become attuned to things, able to pick up and then hopefully differentiate finer and finer frequencies each time.

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Why do you feel good when your head comes up with clear thoughts […]? You create something, you bring things together. You show connections (one doesn’t create anything oneself, but brings ideas from elsewhere together in one’s head), and this seems diverting. Does this distract you from existence? Does it create a web of illusion? Or is it connected to the fact that, when formulating such clear thoughts, you open yourself up to the impersonal and are freed from your own self for a time? You play along. You don’t speak to something, you simply speak with. You join in. But it not your own self that you join.

Anselm Kiefer, 2 January 1999, in Notebooks: Volume 1, 1998–1999, translated by Tess Lewis