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"The Outline of History" (1922)
by H.G. Wells:
"Before the nineteenth century there were no ships
in the world much over 2,000 tons burthen; now
there is nothing wonderful about a 50,000-ton
liner. There are people who sneer at this kind
of progress as being a progress in 'mere size,'
but that sort of sneering merely marks the
intellectual limitations of those who indulge in
it. The great ship of the steel-frame building
is not, as they imagine, a magnified version of
the small ship or building of the past; it is a
thing different in kind, more lightly and
strongly built, of finer and stronger materials;
instead of being a thing of precedent and
rule-of-thumb, it is a thing of subtle and
intricate calculation. In the old house or ship,
matter was dominant--the material and its needs
had to be slavishly obeyed; in the new, matter SCALE
has been captured, changed, coerced."
(p 926 of the 3rd Edition)
((Track down and Insert quote from
Stanislaw Lem about the triviality
of mere scale.))
(Apr 22, 2007)
((Andy Warhol - "make things big"))
((Perhpas something from John Cage on how the
projected length of a piece is one of the most
important things to know when composing.))
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