Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?

Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself - so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph.

One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.

By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.

Enemies are somewhere else, as the fighting is almost always “over there,” with Islamic fundamentalism now replacing Russian and Chinese communism as the implacable, furtive menace. And “terrorist” is a more flexible word than “communist.” It can unify a larger number of quite different struggles and interests. What this may mean is that the war will be endless---since there will always be some terrorism.

Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.

Sanity is a cozy lie.