The essence of the question is the opening up, and keeping open, of possibilities.

Unlike seeing, where one can look away, one cannot 'hear away' but must listen ... hearing implies already belonging together in such a manner that one is claimed by what is being said.

A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the 'standpoint of art' can deliver. The Romantic desire for a new mythology... gives the artist and his task in the world the consciousness of a new consecration. He is something like a 'secular saviour' for his creations are expected to achieve on a small scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes.

The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.

The more language is a living operation, the less we are aware of it. Thus it follows from the self-forgetfulness of language that its real being consists in what is said in it.

The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it - what is said.

It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art. There is no doubt that the leaders of the creative artists of the last 50 years concentrated their efforts mainly on eliminating that distance.