Weekend Words: Crash
Weekend Words looks at crashes past with an eye toward a crash-free future.
This week, the Whitney Museum announced that it had restored an artwork, Douglas Davis’s “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence” (1994), which had crashed, not by slipping off a wall or toppling from a pedestal, but by having been written in an obsolete programming code.
Weekend Words looks at crashes past with an eye toward a crash-free future.
“After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.”
—J. G. Ballard, from Crash
“I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock-market crash, where they lost several million dollars, a rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea.”
—Federico Garcia Lorca
“It was at a particular moment in the history of my own rages that I saw the Western world conditioned by the images of Marx, Darwin and Freud; and Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western world. The simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.”
—William Golding
“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.”
—Alfred North Whitehead
“There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.”
—Norman Mailer, from Armies of the Night
“Who has not experienced the unutterable despair that follows the crash of a treasured bottle.”
—W. C. Fields
“Crash programs fail because they are based on the theory that, with nine pregnant women, you can get a baby in one month.”
—Werner von Braun
