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Impact and Inevitability

Read this article on the inevitability in storytelling and Italo Calvino. He says :

We live in an unending rainfall of images. The most powerful media transform the world into images and multiply it by means of the phantasmagoric play of mirrors. These are images stripped of the inner inevitability that ought to mark every image as form and as meaning, as a claim on the attention and as a source of possible meanings. 

Love the idea of the hailstorm of images and words stripped of their inner inevitability to help me understand how it is that we live in a time when there is surfeit of both and yet very little meaning that can be derived of either.

Coincidentally (and in a totally different context), read another article via Delanceyplace which posits that explanations rob events of their emotional impact.

studies show that the mere act of explaining an unpleasant event can help defang it. ... But just as explanations ameliorate the impact of unpleasant events, so too do they ameliorate the impact of pleasant events.

There is a huge element of explanation involved in the confetti of words and images that we are constantly showered with. With that both inner meaning and emotional impact is lost.

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