p.240 (tea ceremony) with each step there was a peeling away of the outside world, an emptying and a clarifying
p.241 part of whats being celebrated is the notion of transience itself… the most precious thing in life is its uncertainty. The chipped, worn implements (of tea ceremony) nurture the submission of one’s ego to the natural process of change and mortality
p.244 build spaces that harbor silence just as we create structures to facilitate other pursuits… our lack of silence today reflects a failure in architecture.
p.248 Pierre Desloges (deaf 1700’s) The privation (lack?) of hearing makes us more attentive in general. Our ideas concentrated in ourselves, so to speak, necessarily incline us toward reflectiveness and meditation
p.252 Buddhism teaches that its a mistake to focus on one’s identity as an individual, since in reality one is enmeshed with everything in the world… Deaf are more likely to find the balance between detachment from particulars and attachment to the panorama of existence.
p.251 I dont feel badly at all that i can’t hear… Its very quiet and that means i can concentrate more on everything visual… If I had a hearing aid I’d be straining so hard to focus on what you are saying… its nice a lot of the time not having to deal with all the garbage thats thrown at you. It frees you.
Buddist meditation- study of silence parallels between experience of Buddhism and deafness.
p.254 dorms built on far side… they thought it would be a more efficient operational use of space if they maintained segregated blobs of functionality. People live way off apart from where they study. They pray and study way off from where they eat and exersize… It was profound misreading of life of Deaf on campus which was all about free-flowing circulation between different elements… the authorities created islands that killed life on campus
different regions cross-reference cross-modalities
the brain of campus reverted to older model of discrete regions delegated to perform separate tasks (like Newtonian, Cartesian separate parts- like zoning laws, like suburbia- very anti-holographic.
