Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.
Interpretation
Deserts symbolize a timeless space where creativity and profound thoughts can flourish, free from the constraints of conventional time.
In this quote, J. G. Ballard reflects on the unique quality of deserts as places devoid of future expectations, allowing for a sense of timelessness. He suggests that in such barren landscapes, human constructs—whether cities, monuments, or modern establishments like shopping malls—exist outside the normal flow of time, creating a fertile ground for significant figures and creativity to emerge, similar to the way religious leaders have historically risen from desert environments.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of creativity in modern society, this quote can highlight how unconventional spaces can inspire innovation.
Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.
Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell.
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?
The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change.
Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.
I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end.
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
As you travel through the Middle East what keeps on striking home to me is how similar everyone is, and yet the degree to which we can find differences to fight wars over. It requires a great deal of empathy, I think, between various sides to overcome this history and live in peace.
So really what it comes down to, it's God. Wherever you look, it's God appearing as this, that, that...and what you really love and appreciate in each form is the divine formless out of which each form comes. But to be able to sense that you have to sense it in yourself first. And that is seeing the beauty in everything, that's really what it means.
If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.