Music – like narrative, like the experience of our lives as we live them – unfolds in time.

There is always a model by which we are understanding, an exemplar with which we are comparing, what we see, and where it is not identified it usually means that we have tacitly adopted the model of the machine.

Of course we do not actually build things up in the way that the left hemisphere imagines. That illusion comes from the fact that when we ask ourselves, after the event, how we understood something, our linear-processing left hemisphere comes up with the only way it knows, the way it would have had to do it if asked.

Emotion is inseparable from the body in which it is felt, and emotion is also the basis for our engagement with the world.

So thinking is prior to language. What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them. This has its good side, and its bad. It aids consistency of reference over time and space. But it can also exert a restrictive force on what and how we think. It represents a more fixed version of the world: it shapes, rather than grounds, our thinking.

Metaphor is the crucial aspect of language whereby it retains its connectedness to the world, and.

If language was given to men to conceal their thoughts, then gesture’s purpose was to disclose them.’377.

Meaning emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it.

We bring about a world in consciousness that is partly what is given, and partly what we bring, something that comes into being through this particular conjunction and no other. And the key to this is the kind of attention we pay to the world.

Socialism and capitalism are both essentially materialist, just different ways of approaching the lifeless world of matter and deciding how to share the spoils.