Weekend Words: Separation
This week, amNewYork reported on a recent study from the University of Missouri investigating smartphone separation anxiety.
This week, amNewYork reported on a recent study from the University of Missouri investigating smartphone separation anxiety: “Researchers found that respondents had higher heart rates, higher blood pressure levels, and lower cognitive abilities when they weren’t allowed to answer their ringing phones.”
“The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle; it stands for permanence and separation from the world.”
—Simone de Beauvoir
“I’ve studied all the lore of separation
From grievances bare-headed in the night.”
—Osip Mandelstam, “Tristia”
“For when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation.”
—Simone Weil
“How many frivolous quarrels and disgusts are there, which people of common prudence endeavour to forget, when they lie under a necessity of passing their lives together; but which would soon be inflamed into the most deadly hatred, were they pursued to the utmost, under the prospect of an easy separation?”
—David Hume, “Of Polygamy and Divorces”
“In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.”
—Marcel Proust
“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
—Thomas Jefferson, “Declaration of Independence”
“The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation. Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice.”
—W. H. Auden
“Under the doctrine of separation of powers, the manner in which the president personally exercises his assigned executive powers is not subject to questioning by another branch of government.”
—Richard M. Nixon
“Technology is us. There is no separation. It’s a pure expression of human creative will. It doesn’t exist anywhere else in the universe. I’m rather sure of that.”
—David Cronenberg
“Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.”
—Walter Benjamin
