## Highlights - A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. ([Location 37](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=37)) - It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play. ([Location 48](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=48)) - we can speak of finite games as having temporal boundaries ([Location 51](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=51)) - Infinite players cannot say when their game began, nor do they care. They do not care for the reason that their game is not bounded by time. Indeed, the only purpose of the game is to prevent it from coming to an end, to keep everyone in play. ([Location 77](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=77)) - There are no spatial or numerical boundaries to an infinite game. No world is marked with the barriers of infinite play, and there is no question of eligibility since anyone who wishes may play an infinite game. While finite games are externally defined, infinite games are internally defined. The time of an infinite game is not world time, but time created within the play itself. Since each play of an infinite game eliminates boundaries, it opens to players a new horizon of time. ([Location 79](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=79)) - Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game. ([Location 85](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=85)) - In the narrowest sense rules are not laws; they do not mandate specific behavior, but only restrain the freedom of the players, allowing considerable room for choice within those restraints. ([Location 92](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=92)) - The rules of an infinite game must change in the course of play. The rules are changed when the players of an infinite game agree that the play is imperiled by a finite outcome—that is, by the victory of some players and the defeat of others. The rules of an infinite game are changed to prevent anyone from winning the game and to bring as many persons as possible into the play. ([Location 103](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=103)) - Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries. ([Location 120](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=120)) - Since finite games are played to be won, players make every move in a game in order to win it. Whatever is not done in the interest of winning is not part of the game. The constant attentiveness of finite players to the progress of the competition can lead them to believe that every move they make they must make. ([Location 127](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=127)) - To account for the large gap between the actual freedom of finite players to step off the field of play at any time and the experienced necessity to stay at the struggle, we can say that as finite players we somehow veil this freedom from ourselves. Some self-veiling is present in all finite games. Players must intentionally forget the inherently voluntary nature of their play, else all competitive effort will desert them. ([Location 138](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=138)) - The issue here is not whether self-veiling can be avoided, or even should be avoided. Indeed, no finite play is possible without it. The issue is whether we are ever willing to drop the veil and openly acknowledge, if only to ourselves, that we have freely chosen to face the world through a mask. ([Location 157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=157)) - Since finite games can be played within an infinite game, infinite players do not eschew the performed roles of finite play. On the contrary, they enter into finite games with all the appropriate energy and self-veiling, but they do so without the seriousness of finite players. ([Location 168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=168)) - To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself. ([Location 181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=181)) - Surprise is a crucial element in most finite games. If we are not prepared to meet each of the possible moves of an opponent, our chances of losing are most certainly increased. It is therefore by surprising our opponent that we are most likely to win. Surprise in finite play is the triumph of the past over the future. ([Location 207](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=207)) - Infinite players, on the other hand, continue their play in the expectation of being surprised. If surprise is no longer possible, all play ceases. Surprise causes finite play to end; it is the reason for infinite play to continue. ([Location 212](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=212)) - To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated. Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition. Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future. 18 ([Location 224](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=224)) - What one wins in a finite game is a title. A title is the acknowledgment of others that one has been the winner of a particular game. ([Location 228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=228)) - Death in life is a mode of existence in which one has ceased all play; there is no further striving for titles. All competitive engagement with others has been abandoned. ([Location 249](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=249)) - Life in death concerns those who are titled and whose titles, since they are timeless, may not be extinguished by death. ([Location 254](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=254)) - What the winners of finite games achieve is not properly an afterlife but an afterworld, not continuing existence but continuing recognition of their titles. ([Location 263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=263)) - This is a contradiction common to all finite play. Because the purpose of a finite game is to bring play to an end with the victory of one of the players, each finite game is played to end itself. The contradiction is precisely that all finite play is play against itself. ([Location 280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=280)) - The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish. ([Location 313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=313)) - Power is always measured in units of comparison. In fact, it is a term of competition: How much resistance can I overcome relative to others? Power is a concept that belongs only in finite play. But power is not properly measurable until the game is completed—until the designated period of time has run out. During the course of play we cannot yet determine the power of the players, because to the degree that it is genuine play the outcome is unknown. ([Location 345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=345)) - one does not win by being powerful; one wins to be powerful. ([Location 352](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=352)) - Infinite players do not oppose the actions of others, but initiate actions of their own in such a way that others will respond by initiating their own. ([Location 375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=375)) - Power is finite in amount. Strength cannot be measured, because it is an opening and not a closing act. Power refers to the freedom persons have within limits, strength to the freedom persons have with limits. ([Location 380](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=380)) - Evil is not the termination of a finite game. Finite players, even those who play for their own lives, know the stakes of the games they freely choose to play. Evil is not the attempt to eliminate the play of another according to published and accepted rules, but to eliminate the play of another regardless of the rules. ([Location 395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=395)) - NO ONE CAN PLAY a game alone. One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others. ([Location 412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=412)) - As we shall see, this ceaseless change does not mean discontinuity; rather change is itself the very basis of our continuity as persons. Only that which can change can continue: this is the principle by which infinite players live. ([Location 417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=417)) - how to contain the serious within the truly playful; that is, how to keep all our finite games in infinite play. ([Location 424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=424)) - When Bismarck described politics as the art of the possible, he meant, of course, that the possible is to be found somewhere within fixed limits, within social realities. He plainly did not mean that the possible extended to those limits themselves. Such a politics is therefore seriousness itself, especially since politicians of nearly every ideology represent themselves as champions of freedom, doing what is necessary and even distasteful toward the end of enlarging the range of the possible. ([Location 431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=431)) - The interest of infinite players has little in common with such politics, since they are not concerned to find how much freedom is available within the given realities—for this is freedom only in the trivial sense of playing at—but are concerned to show how freely we have decided to place these particular boundaries around our finite play. ([Location 436](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=436)) - Just as infinite play cannot be contained within finite play, culture cannot be authentic if held within the boundaries of a society. Of course, it is often the strategy of a society to initiate and embrace a culture as exclusively its own. ([Location 465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=465)) - A large society will consist of a wide variety of games—though all somehow connected, inasmuch as they have a bearing on a final societal ranking. ([Location 473](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=473)) - Like a finite game, a society is numerically, spatially, and temporally limited. Its citizenship is precisely defined, its boundaries are inviolable, and its past is enshrined. The power of citizens in a society is determined by their ranking in games that have been played. A society preserves its memory of past winners. Its record-keeping functions are crucial to societal order. Large bureaucracies grow out of the need to verify the numerous entitlements of the citizens of that society. ([Location 478](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=478)) - The prizes won by its citizens can be protected only if the society as a whole remains powerful in relation to other societies. Those who desire the permanence of their prizes will work to sustain the permanence of the whole. Patriotism in one or several of its many forms (chauvinism, racism, sexism, nationalism, regionalism) is an ingredient in all societal play. ([Location 485](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=485)) - Because culture as such can have no temporal limits, a culture understands its past not as destiny, but as history, that is, as a narrative that has begun but points always toward the endlessly open. Culture is an enterprise of mortals, disdaining to protect themselves against surprise. Living in the strength of their vision, they eschew power and make joyous play of boundaries. ([Location 495](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=495)) - One of the most effective means of self-persuasion available to a citizenry is the bestowal of property. Who actually owns a society’s property, and how it is distributed, are far less important than the fact that property exists at all. ([Location 526](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=526)) - Ownership can never be stolen. Titles are timeless, and so is the ownership of property. ([Location 534](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=534)) - Property is an attempt to recover the past. It returns one to precompetitive status. One is compensated for the amount of time spent (and thus lost) in competition. ([Location 571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=571)) - The more powerful we consider persons to be, the less we expect them to do, for their power can come only from that which they have done. ([Location 586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=586)) - Art is not art, therefore, except as it leads to an engendering creativity in its beholders. Whoever takes possession of the objects of art has not taken possession of the art. Since art is never possession, and always possibility, nothing possessed can have the status of art. ([Location 648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=648)) - To regard society as a species of culture is not to overthrow or even alter society, but only to eliminate its perceived necessity. Infinite players have rules; they just do not forget that rules are an expression of agreement and not a requirement for agreement. ([Location 661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=661)) - where a society is defined by its boundaries, a culture is defined by its horizon. ([Location 667](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=667)) - We are never somewhere in relation to the horizon since the horizon moves with our vision. We can only be somewhere by turning away from the horizon, by replacing vision with opposition, by declaring the place on which we stand to be timeless—a sacred region, a holy land, a body of truth, a code of inviolable commandments. To be somewhere is to absolutize time, space, and number. Every move an infinite player makes is toward the horizon. Every move made by a finite player is within a boundary. Every moment of an infinite game therefore presents a new vision, a new range of possibilities. ([Location 678](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=678)) - every new participant in a culture both enters into an existing context and simultaneously changes that context. Each new speaker of its language both learns the language and alters it. Each new adoption of a tradition makes it a new tradition—just as the family into which a child is born existed prior to that birth, but is nonetheless a new family after the birth. ([Location 687](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=687)) - War presents itself as necessary for self-protection, when in fact it is necessary for self-identification. If it is the impulse of a finite player to go against another nation in war, it is the design of an infinite player to oppose war within a nation. ([Location 716](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=716)) - I AM THE GENIUS of myself, the poietes who composes the sentences I speak and the actions I take. It is I, not the mind, that thinks. It is I, not the will, that acts. It is I, not the nervous system, that feels. ([Location 758](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=758)) - Since being your own genius is dramatic, it has all the paradox of infinite play: You can have what you have only by releasing it to others. The sounds of the words you speak may lie on your own lips, but if you do not relinquish them entirely to a listener they never become words, and you say nothing at all. ([Location 766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=766)) - My parents may have wanted a child, but they could not have wanted me. I am both the outcome of my past and the transformation of my past. To be related to the past as its outcome is to stand in causal continuity with it. ([Location 802](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=802)) - In no way is the source of genius external to itself; never is a child moved to genius. Genius arises with touch. Touch is a characteristically paradoxical phenomenon of infinite play. I am not touched by an other when the distance between us is reduced to zero. I am touched only if I respond from my own center—that is, spontaneously, originally. But you do not touch me except from your own center, out of your own genius. Touching is always reciprocal. You cannot touch me unless I touch you in response. ([Location 854](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=854)) - When I am touched, I am touched only as the person I am behind all the theatrical masks, but at the same time I am changed from within—and whoever touches me is touched as well. We do not touch by design. Indeed, all designs are shattered by touching. Whoever touches and whoever is touched cannot but be surprised. ([Location 864](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=864)) - The character of touching can be seen quite clearly in the way infinite players understand both healing and sexuality. If to be touched is to respond from one’s center, it is also to respond as a whole person. To be whole is to be hale, or healthy. In sum, whoever is touched is healed. The finite player’s interest is not in being healed, or made whole, but in being cured, or made functional. Healing restores me to play, curing restores me to competition in one or another game. Physicians who cure must abstract persons into functions. They treat the illness, not the person. And persons willfully present themselves as functions. ([Location 868](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=868)) - When I am healed I am restored to my center in a way that my freedom as a person is not compromised by my loss of functions. This means that the illness need not be eliminated before I can be healed. I am not free to the degree that I can overcome my infirmities, but only to the degree that I can put my infirmities into play. I am cured of my illness; I am healed with my illness. ([Location 881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=881)) - Healing, of course, has all the reciprocity of touching. Just as I cannot touch myself, I cannot heal myself. But healing requires no specialists, only those who can come to us out of their own center, and who are prepared to be healed themselves. ([Location 884](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=884)) - Sexuality for the infinite player is entirely a matter of touch. One cannot touch without touching sexually. Because sexuality is a drama of origins, it gives full expression to the genius you are and to the genius of others who participate in that drama. ([Location 886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=886)) - What one wants in the sexual contest is not just to have defeated the other, but to have the defeated other. Sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner’s prize is the defeated opponent. Sexual titles, like all other titles, have appropriately conspicuous emblems. However, only in sexuality do persons themselves become property. In slavery or wage labor what we possess is not the persons of the slaves or the workers, but the products of their labors. In this case, to use Marx’s phrase, persons are abstracted from their labor. But in sexuality persons are abstracted from themselves. ([Location 916](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=916)) - Finite sexuality is a form of theater in which the distance between persons is regularly reduced to zero but in which neither touches the other. ([Location 926](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=926)) - There is one other way in which society is shaped by the tensions of finite sexuality: in its orientation toward property. Since sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner’s prize is the loser, the most desirable form of property is the publicly acknowledged possession of another’s person, a relationship to which the possessed must of course freely consent. ([Location 945](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=945)) - Seductions are designed to come to an end. Time runs out. The play is finished. All that remains is recollection, the memory of a moment, and perhaps a longing for its repetition. Seductions cannot be repeated. Once one has won or lost in a particular finite game, the game cannot be played over. Moments once reached cannot be reached again. Lovers often sustain vivid reminders of extraordinary moments, but they are reminded at the same time of their impotence in recreating them. The appetite for novelty in lovemaking—new positions, the use of drugs, exotic surroundings, additional partners—is only a search for new moments that can live on only in recollection. As with all finite play, the goal of veiled sexuality is to bring itself to an end. ([Location 956](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=956)) - Seductions cannot be repeated. Once one has won or lost in a particular finite game, the game cannot be played over. ([Location 957](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=957)) - By contrast, infinite players have no interest in seduction or in restricting the freedom of another to one’s own boundaries of play. ([Location 962](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=962)) - Sexuality is not a bounded phenomenon but a horizonal phenomenon for infinite players. One can never say, therefore, that an infinite player is homosexual, or heterosexual, or celibate, or adulterous, or faithful—because each of these definitions has to do with boundaries, with circumscribed areas and styles of play. Infinite players do not play within sexual boundaries, but with sexual boundaries. They are concerned not with power but with vision. In their sexual play they suffer others, allow them to be as they are. Suffering others, they open themselves. Open, they learn both about others and about themselves. Learning, they grow. What they learn is not about sexuality, but how to be more concretely and originally themselves, to be the genius of their own actions, to be whole. Moving therefore from an original center, the sexual engagements of infinite players have no standards, no ideals, no marks of success or failure. Neither orgasm nor conception is a goal in their play, although either may be part of the play. ([Location 965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=965)) - There is nothing hidden in infinite sexuality. Sexual desire is exposed as sexual desire and is never therefore serious. Its satisfaction is never an achievement, but an act in a continuing relationship, and therefore joyous. Its lack of satisfaction is never a failure, but only a matter to be taken on into further play. ([Location 973](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=973)) - Infinite sexuality does not focus its attention on certain parts or regions of the body. Infinite lovers have no “private parts.” They do not regard their bodies as having secret zones that can be exposed or made accessible to others for special favors. It is not their bodies but their persons they make accessible to others. The paradox of infinite sexuality is that by regarding sexuality as an expression of the person and not the body, it becomes fully embodied play. It becomes a drama of touching. The triumph of finite sexuality is to be liberated from play into the body. The essence of infinite sexuality is to be liberated into play with the body. In finite sexuality I expect to relate to you as a body; in infinite sexuality I expect to relate to you in your body. Infinite lovers conform to the sexual expectations of others in a way that does not expose something hidden, but unveils something in plain sight: that sexual engagement is a poiesis of free persons. In this exposure they emerge as the persons they are. They meet others with their limitations, and not within their limitations. In doing so they expect to be transformed—and are transformed. ([Location 983](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=983)) - A FINITE GAME OCCURS within a world. The fact that it must be limited temporally, numerically, and spatially means that there is something against which the limits stand. There is an outside to every finite game. Its limits are meaningless unless there is something to be limited, unless there is a larger space, a longer time, a greater number of possible competitors. There is nothing about a finite game, in itself, that determines at what time it is to be played, or by whom, or where. ([Location 993](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=993)) - A world provides an absolute reference without which the time, place, and participants make no sense. ([Location 1002](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1002)) - The fact that a finite game needs an audience before which it can be played, and the fact that an audience needs to be singularly absorbed in the events before it, show the crucial reciprocity of finite play and the world. Finite players need the world to provide an absolute reference for understanding themselves; simultaneously, the world needs the theater of finite play to remain a world. ([Location 1020](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1020)) - players only so much time to win their titles. Early in a game time seems abundant, and there appears a greater freedom to develop future strategies. Late in a game, time is rapidly being consumed. As choices become more limited they become more important. Errors are more disastrous. ([Location 1043](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1043)) - For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have time to be free. ([Location 1048](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1048)) - The passage of time is always relative to that which does not pass, to the timeless. Victories occur in time, but the titles won in them are timeless. Titles neither age nor die. The points of reference for all finite history are signal triumphs meant never to be forgotten: ([Location 1049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1049)) - The infinite player in us does not consume time but generates it. Because infinite play is dramatic and has no scripted conclusion, its time is time lived and not time viewed. As an infinite player one is neither young nor old, for one does not live in the time of another. There is therefore no external measure of an infinite player’s temporality. Time does not pass for an infinite player. Each moment of time is a beginning. Each moment is not the beginning of a period of time. It is the beginning of an event that gives the time within it its specific quality. For an infinite player there is no such thing as an hour of time. There can be an hour of love, or a day of grieving, or a season of learning, or a period of labor. ([Location 1057](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1057)) - For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have the time to be free. For the infinite player in us time is a function of freedom. We are free to have time. A finite player puts play into time. An infinite player puts time into play. ([Location 1066](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1066)) - NATURE IS the realm of the unspeakable. It has no voice of its own, and nothing to say. We experience the unspeakability of nature as its utter indifference to human culture. ([Location 1079](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1079)) - We take nature on as an opponent to be subdued for the sake of civilization. We count among the highest achievements of modern society the development of a technology that allows us to master nature’s vagaries. ([Location 1082](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1082)) - The assumption guiding our struggle against nature is that deep within itself nature contains a structure, an order, that is ultimately intelligible to the human understanding. Since this inherent structure determines the way things change, and is not itself subject to change, we speak of nature being lawful, of repeating itself according to quite predictable patterns. ([Location 1088](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1088)) - While our great skill lies in finding patterns of repetition under the apparent play of accident and chance, less successful civilizations dealt with the threats of natural accident by appealing to supernatural powers for protection. But the voices of the gods proved to be ignorant and false; they have been silenced by the truth. ([Location 1100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1100)) - There is an irony in our silencing of the gods. By presuming to speak for the unspeakable, by hearing our own voice as the voice of nature, we have had to step outside the circle of nature. It is one thing for physics and chemistry to be speaking about nature; it is quite another for physics and chemistry to be the speaking of nature. ([Location 1103](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1103)) - What we thought we read in nature we discover we have read into nature. “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning” (Heisenberg). ([Location 1114](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1114)) - At its root all language has the character of metaphor, because no matter what it intends to be about it remains language, and remains absolutely unlike whatever it is about. ([Location 1124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1124)) - Like explanation, narrative is concerned with a sequence of events and brings its tale to a conclusion. However, there is no general law that makes this outcome necessary. In a genuine story there is no law that makes any act necessary. Explanations place all apparent possibilities into the context of the necessary; stories set all necessities into the context of the possible. Explanation can tolerate a degree of chance, but it cannot comprehend freedom at all. We explain nothing when we say that persons do whatever they do because they choose to do it. On the other hand, causation cannot find a place in narrative. We have not told a story when we show that persons do whatever they do because they were caused to do it—by their genes, their social circumstances, or the influence of the gods. Explanations settle issues, showing that matters must end as they have. Narratives raise issues, showing that matters do not end as they must but as they do. Explanation sets the need for further inquiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew. ([Location 1145](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1145)) - Explanations succeed only by convincing resistant hearers of their error. If you will not hear my explanations until you are suspicious of your own truths, you will not accept my explanations until you are convinced of your error. ([Location 1170](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1170)) - Whoever wins this struggle is privileged with the claim to true knowledge. Knowledge has been arrived at, it is the outcome of this engagement. Its winners have the uncontested power to make certain statements of fact. They are to be listened to. In those areas appropriate to the contests now concluded, winners possess a knowledge that no longer can be challenged. Knowledge, therefore, is like property. It must be published, declared, or in some other way so displayed that others cannot but take account of it. ([Location 1173](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1173)) - The victorious do not speak with the defeated; they speak for the defeated. Husbands speak for wives in the finite family, and parents for their children. Kings speak for the realm, governors for the state, popes for the church. Indeed, the titled, as titled, cannot speak with anyone. ([Location 1188](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1188)) - Infinite speech is that mode of discourse that consistently reminds us of the unspeakability of nature. It bears no claim to truth, originating from nothing but the genius of the speaker. Infinite speech is therefore not about anything; it is always to someone. It is not command, but address. It belongs entirely to the speakable. ([Location 1201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1201)) - Speaker and listener understand each other not because they have the same knowledge about something, and not because they have established a likeness of mind, but because they know “how to go on” with each other ([Location 1214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1214)) - Finite speech informs another about the world—for the sake of being heard. Infinite speech forms a world about the other—for the sake of listening. ([Location 1221](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1221)) - The contradiction of finite speech is that it must end by being heard. The paradox of infinite speech is that it continues only because it is a way of listening. Finite speech ends with a silence of closure. Infinite speech begins with a disclosure of silence. ([Location 1227](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1227)) - A story cannot be obeyed. Instead of placing one body of knowledge against another, storytellers invite us to return from knowledge to thinking, from a bounded way of looking to an horizonal way of seeing. ([Location 1231](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1231)) - WE CONTROL NATURE for societal reasons. The control of nature advances with our ability to predict the outcome of natural processes. ([Location 1264](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1264)) - The alternative attitudes toward nature can be characterized in a rough way by saying that the result of approaching nature as a hostile Other whose designs are basically inimical to our interests is the machine, while the result of learning to discipline ourselves to consist with the deepest discernable patterns of natural order is the garden. ([Location 1273](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1273)) - This is not a garden one lives beside, but a garden one lives within. It is a place of growth, of maximized spontaneity. To garden is not to engage in a hobby or an amusement; it is to design a culture capable of adjusting to the widest possible range of surprise in nature. Gardeners are acutely attentive to the deep patterns of natural order, but are also aware that there will always be much lying beyond their vision. Gardening is a horizonal activity. ([Location 1279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1279)) - The most elemental difference between the machine and the garden is that one is driven by a force which must be introduced from without, the other grown by an energy which originates from within itself. ([Location 1287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1287)) - Our freedom in relation to nature is not the freedom to change nature; it is not the possession of power over natural phenomena. It is the freedom to change ourselves. We are perfectly free to design a culture that will turn on the awareness that vitality cannot be given but only found, that the given patterns of spontaneity in nature are not only to be respected, but to be celebrated. ([Location 1302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1302)) - The paradox in our relation to nature is that the more deeply a culture respects the indifference of nature, the more creatively it will call upon its own spontaneity in response. The more clearly we remind ourselves that we can have no unnatural influence on nature, the more our culture will embody a freedom to embrace surprise and unpredictability. Human freedom is not a freedom over nature; it is the freedom to be natural, that is, to answer to the spontaneity of nature with our own spontaneity. Though we are free to be natural, we are not free by nature; we are free by culture, by history. ([Location 1313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1313)) - The contradiction in our relation to nature is that the more vigorously we attempt to force its agreement with our own designs the more subject we are to its indifference, the more vulnerable to its unseeing forces. The more power we exercise over natural process the more powerless we become before it. ([Location 1318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1318)) - While a machine greatly aids the operator in such tasks, it also disciplines its operator. As the machine might be considered the extended arms and legs of the worker, the worker might be considered an extension of the machine. All machines, and especially very complicated machines, require operators to place themselves in a provided location and to perform functions mechanically adapted to the functions of the machine. To use the machine for control is to be controlled by the machine. ([Location 1325](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1325)) - Most consumer products are “styled” inasmuch as they actually standardize the activity or the taste of the consumer. In a perfect contradiction we are urged to buy a “styled” artifact because others are also buying it—that is, we are asked to express our genius by giving up our genius. ([Location 1333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1333)) - Because we make use of machinery in the belief we can increase the range of our freedom, and instead only decrease it, we use machines against ourselves. ([Location 1336](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1336)) - A machine is not a way of doing something; it stands in the way of doing something. When we use machines to achieve whatever it is we desire, we cannot have what we desire until we have finished with the machine, until we can rid ourselves of the mechanical means of reaching our intended outcome. The goal of technology is therefore to eliminate itself, to become silent, invisible, carefree. We do not purchase an automobile, for example, merely to own some machinery. Indeed, it is not machinery we are buying at all, but what we can have by way of it: a means of rapidly carrying us from one location to another, an object of envy for others, protection from the weather. ([Location 1338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1338)) - When machinery functions perfectly it ceases to be there— ([Location 1346](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1346)) - Finite gardeners, converting agriculture into commerce, “raise” or “produce” animals—or meat products—as though by machine. Animal husbandry is a science, a method of controlling growth. It assumes that animals belong to us. ([Location 1394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1394)) - While machinery is meant to work changes without changing its operators, gardening transforms its workers. One learns how to drive a car, one learns to drive as a car; but one becomes a gardener. Gardening is not outcome-oriented. A successful harvest is not the end of a garden’s existence, but only a phase of it. ([Location 1398](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1398)) - Inasmuch as gardens do not conclude with a harvest and are not played for a certain outcome, one never arrives anywhere with a garden. A garden is a place where growth is found. ([Location 1409](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1409)) - “The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes” (Proust). ([Location 1423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1423)) - A gardener, whose attention is ever on the spontaneities of nature, acquires the gift of seeing differences, looks always for the merest changes in plant growth, or in the composition of the soil, the emerging populations of insects and earthworms. ([Location 1424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1424)) - Waste persons are those no longer useful as resources to a society for whatever reason, and have become apatrides, or noncitizens. Waste persons must be placed out of view—in ghettos, slums, reservations, camps, retirement villages, mass graves, remote territories, strategic hamlets—all places of desolation, and uninhabitable. We live in a century whose Master Players have created many millions of such “superfluous persons” (Rubenstein). A people does not become superfluous by itself, any more than natural waste creates itself. It is society that declares some persons to be waste. Human trash is not an unfortunate burden on a society, an indirect result of its proper conduct; it is its direct product. ([Location 1461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1461)) - There is but one infinite game. ([Location 1616](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1616))  ## Highlights - A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. ([Location 37](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=37)) - It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play. ([Location 48](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=48)) - we can speak of finite games as having temporal boundaries ([Location 51](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=51)) - Infinite players cannot say when their game began, nor do they care. They do not care for the reason that their game is not bounded by time. Indeed, the only purpose of the game is to prevent it from coming to an end, to keep everyone in play. ([Location 77](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=77)) - There are no spatial or numerical boundaries to an infinite game. No world is marked with the barriers of infinite play, and there is no question of eligibility since anyone who wishes may play an infinite game. While finite games are externally defined, infinite games are internally defined. The time of an infinite game is not world time, but time created within the play itself. Since each play of an infinite game eliminates boundaries, it opens to players a new horizon of time. ([Location 79](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=79)) - Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game. ([Location 85](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=85)) - In the narrowest sense rules are not laws; they do not mandate specific behavior, but only restrain the freedom of the players, allowing considerable room for choice within those restraints. ([Location 92](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=92)) - The rules of an infinite game must change in the course of play. The rules are changed when the players of an infinite game agree that the play is imperiled by a finite outcome—that is, by the victory of some players and the defeat of others. The rules of an infinite game are changed to prevent anyone from winning the game and to bring as many persons as possible into the play. ([Location 103](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=103)) - Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries. ([Location 120](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=120)) - Since finite games are played to be won, players make every move in a game in order to win it. Whatever is not done in the interest of winning is not part of the game. The constant attentiveness of finite players to the progress of the competition can lead them to believe that every move they make they must make. ([Location 127](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=127)) - To account for the large gap between the actual freedom of finite players to step off the field of play at any time and the experienced necessity to stay at the struggle, we can say that as finite players we somehow veil this freedom from ourselves. Some self-veiling is present in all finite games. Players must intentionally forget the inherently voluntary nature of their play, else all competitive effort will desert them. ([Location 138](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=138)) - The issue here is not whether self-veiling can be avoided, or even should be avoided. Indeed, no finite play is possible without it. The issue is whether we are ever willing to drop the veil and openly acknowledge, if only to ourselves, that we have freely chosen to face the world through a mask. ([Location 157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=157)) - Since finite games can be played within an infinite game, infinite players do not eschew the performed roles of finite play. On the contrary, they enter into finite games with all the appropriate energy and self-veiling, but they do so without the seriousness of finite players. ([Location 168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=168)) - To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself. ([Location 181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=181)) - Surprise is a crucial element in most finite games. If we are not prepared to meet each of the possible moves of an opponent, our chances of losing are most certainly increased. It is therefore by surprising our opponent that we are most likely to win. Surprise in finite play is the triumph of the past over the future. ([Location 207](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=207)) - Infinite players, on the other hand, continue their play in the expectation of being surprised. If surprise is no longer possible, all play ceases. Surprise causes finite play to end; it is the reason for infinite play to continue. ([Location 212](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=212)) - To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated. Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition. Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future. 18 ([Location 224](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=224)) - What one wins in a finite game is a title. A title is the acknowledgment of others that one has been the winner of a particular game. ([Location 228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=228)) - Death in life is a mode of existence in which one has ceased all play; there is no further striving for titles. All competitive engagement with others has been abandoned. ([Location 249](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=249)) - Life in death concerns those who are titled and whose titles, since they are timeless, may not be extinguished by death. ([Location 254](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=254)) - What the winners of finite games achieve is not properly an afterlife but an afterworld, not continuing existence but continuing recognition of their titles. ([Location 263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=263)) - This is a contradiction common to all finite play. Because the purpose of a finite game is to bring play to an end with the victory of one of the players, each finite game is played to end itself. The contradiction is precisely that all finite play is play against itself. ([Location 280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=280)) - The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish. ([Location 313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=313)) - Power is always measured in units of comparison. In fact, it is a term of competition: How much resistance can I overcome relative to others? Power is a concept that belongs only in finite play. But power is not properly measurable until the game is completed—until the designated period of time has run out. During the course of play we cannot yet determine the power of the players, because to the degree that it is genuine play the outcome is unknown. ([Location 345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=345)) - one does not win by being powerful; one wins to be powerful. ([Location 352](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=352)) - Infinite players do not oppose the actions of others, but initiate actions of their own in such a way that others will respond by initiating their own. ([Location 375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=375)) - Power is finite in amount. Strength cannot be measured, because it is an opening and not a closing act. Power refers to the freedom persons have within limits, strength to the freedom persons have with limits. ([Location 380](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=380)) - Evil is not the termination of a finite game. Finite players, even those who play for their own lives, know the stakes of the games they freely choose to play. Evil is not the attempt to eliminate the play of another according to published and accepted rules, but to eliminate the play of another regardless of the rules. ([Location 395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=395)) - NO ONE CAN PLAY a game alone. One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others. ([Location 412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=412)) - As we shall see, this ceaseless change does not mean discontinuity; rather change is itself the very basis of our continuity as persons. Only that which can change can continue: this is the principle by which infinite players live. ([Location 417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=417)) - how to contain the serious within the truly playful; that is, how to keep all our finite games in infinite play. ([Location 424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=424)) - When Bismarck described politics as the art of the possible, he meant, of course, that the possible is to be found somewhere within fixed limits, within social realities. He plainly did not mean that the possible extended to those limits themselves. Such a politics is therefore seriousness itself, especially since politicians of nearly every ideology represent themselves as champions of freedom, doing what is necessary and even distasteful toward the end of enlarging the range of the possible. ([Location 431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=431)) - The interest of infinite players has little in common with such politics, since they are not concerned to find how much freedom is available within the given realities—for this is freedom only in the trivial sense of playing at—but are concerned to show how freely we have decided to place these particular boundaries around our finite play. ([Location 436](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=436)) - Just as infinite play cannot be contained within finite play, culture cannot be authentic if held within the boundaries of a society. Of course, it is often the strategy of a society to initiate and embrace a culture as exclusively its own. ([Location 465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=465)) - A large society will consist of a wide variety of games—though all somehow connected, inasmuch as they have a bearing on a final societal ranking. ([Location 473](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=473)) - Like a finite game, a society is numerically, spatially, and temporally limited. Its citizenship is precisely defined, its boundaries are inviolable, and its past is enshrined. The power of citizens in a society is determined by their ranking in games that have been played. A society preserves its memory of past winners. Its record-keeping functions are crucial to societal order. Large bureaucracies grow out of the need to verify the numerous entitlements of the citizens of that society. ([Location 478](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=478)) - The prizes won by its citizens can be protected only if the society as a whole remains powerful in relation to other societies. Those who desire the permanence of their prizes will work to sustain the permanence of the whole. Patriotism in one or several of its many forms (chauvinism, racism, sexism, nationalism, regionalism) is an ingredient in all societal play. ([Location 485](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=485)) - Because culture as such can have no temporal limits, a culture understands its past not as destiny, but as history, that is, as a narrative that has begun but points always toward the endlessly open. Culture is an enterprise of mortals, disdaining to protect themselves against surprise. Living in the strength of their vision, they eschew power and make joyous play of boundaries. ([Location 495](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=495)) - One of the most effective means of self-persuasion available to a citizenry is the bestowal of property. Who actually owns a society’s property, and how it is distributed, are far less important than the fact that property exists at all. ([Location 526](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=526)) - Ownership can never be stolen. Titles are timeless, and so is the ownership of property. ([Location 534](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=534)) - Property is an attempt to recover the past. It returns one to precompetitive status. One is compensated for the amount of time spent (and thus lost) in competition. ([Location 571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=571)) - The more powerful we consider persons to be, the less we expect them to do, for their power can come only from that which they have done. ([Location 586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=586)) - Art is not art, therefore, except as it leads to an engendering creativity in its beholders. Whoever takes possession of the objects of art has not taken possession of the art. Since art is never possession, and always possibility, nothing possessed can have the status of art. ([Location 648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=648)) - To regard society as a species of culture is not to overthrow or even alter society, but only to eliminate its perceived necessity. Infinite players have rules; they just do not forget that rules are an expression of agreement and not a requirement for agreement. ([Location 661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=661)) - where a society is defined by its boundaries, a culture is defined by its horizon. ([Location 667](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=667)) - We are never somewhere in relation to the horizon since the horizon moves with our vision. We can only be somewhere by turning away from the horizon, by replacing vision with opposition, by declaring the place on which we stand to be timeless—a sacred region, a holy land, a body of truth, a code of inviolable commandments. To be somewhere is to absolutize time, space, and number. Every move an infinite player makes is toward the horizon. Every move made by a finite player is within a boundary. Every moment of an infinite game therefore presents a new vision, a new range of possibilities. ([Location 678](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=678)) - every new participant in a culture both enters into an existing context and simultaneously changes that context. Each new speaker of its language both learns the language and alters it. Each new adoption of a tradition makes it a new tradition—just as the family into which a child is born existed prior to that birth, but is nonetheless a new family after the birth. ([Location 687](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=687)) - War presents itself as necessary for self-protection, when in fact it is necessary for self-identification. If it is the impulse of a finite player to go against another nation in war, it is the design of an infinite player to oppose war within a nation. ([Location 716](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=716)) - I AM THE GENIUS of myself, the poietes who composes the sentences I speak and the actions I take. It is I, not the mind, that thinks. It is I, not the will, that acts. It is I, not the nervous system, that feels. ([Location 758](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=758)) - Since being your own genius is dramatic, it has all the paradox of infinite play: You can have what you have only by releasing it to others. The sounds of the words you speak may lie on your own lips, but if you do not relinquish them entirely to a listener they never become words, and you say nothing at all. ([Location 766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=766)) - My parents may have wanted a child, but they could not have wanted me. I am both the outcome of my past and the transformation of my past. To be related to the past as its outcome is to stand in causal continuity with it. ([Location 802](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=802)) - In no way is the source of genius external to itself; never is a child moved to genius. Genius arises with touch. Touch is a characteristically paradoxical phenomenon of infinite play. I am not touched by an other when the distance between us is reduced to zero. I am touched only if I respond from my own center—that is, spontaneously, originally. But you do not touch me except from your own center, out of your own genius. Touching is always reciprocal. You cannot touch me unless I touch you in response. ([Location 854](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=854)) - When I am touched, I am touched only as the person I am behind all the theatrical masks, but at the same time I am changed from within—and whoever touches me is touched as well. We do not touch by design. Indeed, all designs are shattered by touching. Whoever touches and whoever is touched cannot but be surprised. ([Location 864](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=864)) - The character of touching can be seen quite clearly in the way infinite players understand both healing and sexuality. If to be touched is to respond from one’s center, it is also to respond as a whole person. To be whole is to be hale, or healthy. In sum, whoever is touched is healed. The finite player’s interest is not in being healed, or made whole, but in being cured, or made functional. Healing restores me to play, curing restores me to competition in one or another game. Physicians who cure must abstract persons into functions. They treat the illness, not the person. And persons willfully present themselves as functions. ([Location 868](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=868)) - When I am healed I am restored to my center in a way that my freedom as a person is not compromised by my loss of functions. This means that the illness need not be eliminated before I can be healed. I am not free to the degree that I can overcome my infirmities, but only to the degree that I can put my infirmities into play. I am cured of my illness; I am healed with my illness. ([Location 881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=881)) - Healing, of course, has all the reciprocity of touching. Just as I cannot touch myself, I cannot heal myself. But healing requires no specialists, only those who can come to us out of their own center, and who are prepared to be healed themselves. ([Location 884](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=884)) - Sexuality for the infinite player is entirely a matter of touch. One cannot touch without touching sexually. Because sexuality is a drama of origins, it gives full expression to the genius you are and to the genius of others who participate in that drama. ([Location 886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=886)) - What one wants in the sexual contest is not just to have defeated the other, but to have the defeated other. Sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner’s prize is the defeated opponent. Sexual titles, like all other titles, have appropriately conspicuous emblems. However, only in sexuality do persons themselves become property. In slavery or wage labor what we possess is not the persons of the slaves or the workers, but the products of their labors. In this case, to use Marx’s phrase, persons are abstracted from their labor. But in sexuality persons are abstracted from themselves. ([Location 916](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=916)) - Finite sexuality is a form of theater in which the distance between persons is regularly reduced to zero but in which neither touches the other. ([Location 926](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=926)) - There is one other way in which society is shaped by the tensions of finite sexuality: in its orientation toward property. Since sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner’s prize is the loser, the most desirable form of property is the publicly acknowledged possession of another’s person, a relationship to which the possessed must of course freely consent. ([Location 945](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=945)) - Seductions are designed to come to an end. Time runs out. The play is finished. All that remains is recollection, the memory of a moment, and perhaps a longing for its repetition. Seductions cannot be repeated. Once one has won or lost in a particular finite game, the game cannot be played over. Moments once reached cannot be reached again. Lovers often sustain vivid reminders of extraordinary moments, but they are reminded at the same time of their impotence in recreating them. The appetite for novelty in lovemaking—new positions, the use of drugs, exotic surroundings, additional partners—is only a search for new moments that can live on only in recollection. As with all finite play, the goal of veiled sexuality is to bring itself to an end. ([Location 956](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=956)) - Seductions cannot be repeated. Once one has won or lost in a particular finite game, the game cannot be played over. ([Location 957](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=957)) - By contrast, infinite players have no interest in seduction or in restricting the freedom of another to one’s own boundaries of play. ([Location 962](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=962)) - Sexuality is not a bounded phenomenon but a horizonal phenomenon for infinite players. One can never say, therefore, that an infinite player is homosexual, or heterosexual, or celibate, or adulterous, or faithful—because each of these definitions has to do with boundaries, with circumscribed areas and styles of play. Infinite players do not play within sexual boundaries, but with sexual boundaries. They are concerned not with power but with vision. In their sexual play they suffer others, allow them to be as they are. Suffering others, they open themselves. Open, they learn both about others and about themselves. Learning, they grow. What they learn is not about sexuality, but how to be more concretely and originally themselves, to be the genius of their own actions, to be whole. Moving therefore from an original center, the sexual engagements of infinite players have no standards, no ideals, no marks of success or failure. Neither orgasm nor conception is a goal in their play, although either may be part of the play. ([Location 965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=965)) - There is nothing hidden in infinite sexuality. Sexual desire is exposed as sexual desire and is never therefore serious. Its satisfaction is never an achievement, but an act in a continuing relationship, and therefore joyous. Its lack of satisfaction is never a failure, but only a matter to be taken on into further play. ([Location 973](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=973)) - Infinite sexuality does not focus its attention on certain parts or regions of the body. Infinite lovers have no “private parts.” They do not regard their bodies as having secret zones that can be exposed or made accessible to others for special favors. It is not their bodies but their persons they make accessible to others. The paradox of infinite sexuality is that by regarding sexuality as an expression of the person and not the body, it becomes fully embodied play. It becomes a drama of touching. The triumph of finite sexuality is to be liberated from play into the body. The essence of infinite sexuality is to be liberated into play with the body. In finite sexuality I expect to relate to you as a body; in infinite sexuality I expect to relate to you in your body. Infinite lovers conform to the sexual expectations of others in a way that does not expose something hidden, but unveils something in plain sight: that sexual engagement is a poiesis of free persons. In this exposure they emerge as the persons they are. They meet others with their limitations, and not within their limitations. In doing so they expect to be transformed—and are transformed. ([Location 983](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=983)) - A FINITE GAME OCCURS within a world. The fact that it must be limited temporally, numerically, and spatially means that there is something against which the limits stand. There is an outside to every finite game. Its limits are meaningless unless there is something to be limited, unless there is a larger space, a longer time, a greater number of possible competitors. There is nothing about a finite game, in itself, that determines at what time it is to be played, or by whom, or where. ([Location 993](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=993)) - A world provides an absolute reference without which the time, place, and participants make no sense. ([Location 1002](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1002)) - The fact that a finite game needs an audience before which it can be played, and the fact that an audience needs to be singularly absorbed in the events before it, show the crucial reciprocity of finite play and the world. Finite players need the world to provide an absolute reference for understanding themselves; simultaneously, the world needs the theater of finite play to remain a world. ([Location 1020](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1020)) - players only so much time to win their titles. Early in a game time seems abundant, and there appears a greater freedom to develop future strategies. Late in a game, time is rapidly being consumed. As choices become more limited they become more important. Errors are more disastrous. ([Location 1043](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1043)) - For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have time to be free. ([Location 1048](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1048)) - The passage of time is always relative to that which does not pass, to the timeless. Victories occur in time, but the titles won in them are timeless. Titles neither age nor die. The points of reference for all finite history are signal triumphs meant never to be forgotten: ([Location 1049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1049)) - The infinite player in us does not consume time but generates it. Because infinite play is dramatic and has no scripted conclusion, its time is time lived and not time viewed. As an infinite player one is neither young nor old, for one does not live in the time of another. There is therefore no external measure of an infinite player’s temporality. Time does not pass for an infinite player. Each moment of time is a beginning. Each moment is not the beginning of a period of time. It is the beginning of an event that gives the time within it its specific quality. For an infinite player there is no such thing as an hour of time. There can be an hour of love, or a day of grieving, or a season of learning, or a period of labor. ([Location 1057](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1057)) - For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have the time to be free. For the infinite player in us time is a function of freedom. We are free to have time. A finite player puts play into time. An infinite player puts time into play. ([Location 1066](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1066)) - NATURE IS the realm of the unspeakable. It has no voice of its own, and nothing to say. We experience the unspeakability of nature as its utter indifference to human culture. ([Location 1079](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1079)) - We take nature on as an opponent to be subdued for the sake of civilization. We count among the highest achievements of modern society the development of a technology that allows us to master nature’s vagaries. ([Location 1082](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1082)) - The assumption guiding our struggle against nature is that deep within itself nature contains a structure, an order, that is ultimately intelligible to the human understanding. Since this inherent structure determines the way things change, and is not itself subject to change, we speak of nature being lawful, of repeating itself according to quite predictable patterns. ([Location 1088](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1088)) - While our great skill lies in finding patterns of repetition under the apparent play of accident and chance, less successful civilizations dealt with the threats of natural accident by appealing to supernatural powers for protection. But the voices of the gods proved to be ignorant and false; they have been silenced by the truth. ([Location 1100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1100)) - There is an irony in our silencing of the gods. By presuming to speak for the unspeakable, by hearing our own voice as the voice of nature, we have had to step outside the circle of nature. It is one thing for physics and chemistry to be speaking about nature; it is quite another for physics and chemistry to be the speaking of nature. ([Location 1103](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1103)) - What we thought we read in nature we discover we have read into nature. “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning” (Heisenberg). ([Location 1114](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1114)) - At its root all language has the character of metaphor, because no matter what it intends to be about it remains language, and remains absolutely unlike whatever it is about. ([Location 1124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1124)) - Like explanation, narrative is concerned with a sequence of events and brings its tale to a conclusion. However, there is no general law that makes this outcome necessary. In a genuine story there is no law that makes any act necessary. Explanations place all apparent possibilities into the context of the necessary; stories set all necessities into the context of the possible. Explanation can tolerate a degree of chance, but it cannot comprehend freedom at all. We explain nothing when we say that persons do whatever they do because they choose to do it. On the other hand, causation cannot find a place in narrative. We have not told a story when we show that persons do whatever they do because they were caused to do it—by their genes, their social circumstances, or the influence of the gods. Explanations settle issues, showing that matters must end as they have. Narratives raise issues, showing that matters do not end as they must but as they do. Explanation sets the need for further inquiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew. ([Location 1145](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1145)) - Explanations succeed only by convincing resistant hearers of their error. If you will not hear my explanations until you are suspicious of your own truths, you will not accept my explanations until you are convinced of your error. ([Location 1170](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1170)) - Whoever wins this struggle is privileged with the claim to true knowledge. Knowledge has been arrived at, it is the outcome of this engagement. Its winners have the uncontested power to make certain statements of fact. They are to be listened to. In those areas appropriate to the contests now concluded, winners possess a knowledge that no longer can be challenged. Knowledge, therefore, is like property. It must be published, declared, or in some other way so displayed that others cannot but take account of it. ([Location 1173](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1173)) - The victorious do not speak with the defeated; they speak for the defeated. Husbands speak for wives in the finite family, and parents for their children. Kings speak for the realm, governors for the state, popes for the church. Indeed, the titled, as titled, cannot speak with anyone. ([Location 1188](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1188)) - Infinite speech is that mode of discourse that consistently reminds us of the unspeakability of nature. It bears no claim to truth, originating from nothing but the genius of the speaker. Infinite speech is therefore not about anything; it is always to someone. It is not command, but address. It belongs entirely to the speakable. ([Location 1201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1201)) - Speaker and listener understand each other not because they have the same knowledge about something, and not because they have established a likeness of mind, but because they know “how to go on” with each other ([Location 1214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1214)) - Finite speech informs another about the world—for the sake of being heard. Infinite speech forms a world about the other—for the sake of listening. ([Location 1221](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1221)) - The contradiction of finite speech is that it must end by being heard. The paradox of infinite speech is that it continues only because it is a way of listening. Finite speech ends with a silence of closure. Infinite speech begins with a disclosure of silence. ([Location 1227](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1227)) - A story cannot be obeyed. Instead of placing one body of knowledge against another, storytellers invite us to return from knowledge to thinking, from a bounded way of looking to an horizonal way of seeing. ([Location 1231](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1231)) - WE CONTROL NATURE for societal reasons. The control of nature advances with our ability to predict the outcome of natural processes. ([Location 1264](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1264)) - The alternative attitudes toward nature can be characterized in a rough way by saying that the result of approaching nature as a hostile Other whose designs are basically inimical to our interests is the machine, while the result of learning to discipline ourselves to consist with the deepest discernable patterns of natural order is the garden. ([Location 1273](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1273)) - This is not a garden one lives beside, but a garden one lives within. It is a place of growth, of maximized spontaneity. To garden is not to engage in a hobby or an amusement; it is to design a culture capable of adjusting to the widest possible range of surprise in nature. Gardeners are acutely attentive to the deep patterns of natural order, but are also aware that there will always be much lying beyond their vision. Gardening is a horizonal activity. ([Location 1279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1279)) - The most elemental difference between the machine and the garden is that one is driven by a force which must be introduced from without, the other grown by an energy which originates from within itself. ([Location 1287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1287)) - Our freedom in relation to nature is not the freedom to change nature; it is not the possession of power over natural phenomena. It is the freedom to change ourselves. We are perfectly free to design a culture that will turn on the awareness that vitality cannot be given but only found, that the given patterns of spontaneity in nature are not only to be respected, but to be celebrated. ([Location 1302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1302)) - The paradox in our relation to nature is that the more deeply a culture respects the indifference of nature, the more creatively it will call upon its own spontaneity in response. The more clearly we remind ourselves that we can have no unnatural influence on nature, the more our culture will embody a freedom to embrace surprise and unpredictability. Human freedom is not a freedom over nature; it is the freedom to be natural, that is, to answer to the spontaneity of nature with our own spontaneity. Though we are free to be natural, we are not free by nature; we are free by culture, by history. ([Location 1313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1313)) - The contradiction in our relation to nature is that the more vigorously we attempt to force its agreement with our own designs the more subject we are to its indifference, the more vulnerable to its unseeing forces. The more power we exercise over natural process the more powerless we become before it. ([Location 1318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1318)) - While a machine greatly aids the operator in such tasks, it also disciplines its operator. As the machine might be considered the extended arms and legs of the worker, the worker might be considered an extension of the machine. All machines, and especially very complicated machines, require operators to place themselves in a provided location and to perform functions mechanically adapted to the functions of the machine. To use the machine for control is to be controlled by the machine. ([Location 1325](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1325)) - Most consumer products are “styled” inasmuch as they actually standardize the activity or the taste of the consumer. In a perfect contradiction we are urged to buy a “styled” artifact because others are also buying it—that is, we are asked to express our genius by giving up our genius. ([Location 1333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1333)) - Because we make use of machinery in the belief we can increase the range of our freedom, and instead only decrease it, we use machines against ourselves. ([Location 1336](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1336)) - A machine is not a way of doing something; it stands in the way of doing something. When we use machines to achieve whatever it is we desire, we cannot have what we desire until we have finished with the machine, until we can rid ourselves of the mechanical means of reaching our intended outcome. The goal of technology is therefore to eliminate itself, to become silent, invisible, carefree. We do not purchase an automobile, for example, merely to own some machinery. Indeed, it is not machinery we are buying at all, but what we can have by way of it: a means of rapidly carrying us from one location to another, an object of envy for others, protection from the weather. ([Location 1338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1338)) - When machinery functions perfectly it ceases to be there— ([Location 1346](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1346)) - Finite gardeners, converting agriculture into commerce, “raise” or “produce” animals—or meat products—as though by machine. Animal husbandry is a science, a method of controlling growth. It assumes that animals belong to us. ([Location 1394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1394)) - While machinery is meant to work changes without changing its operators, gardening transforms its workers. One learns how to drive a car, one learns to drive as a car; but one becomes a gardener. Gardening is not outcome-oriented. A successful harvest is not the end of a garden’s existence, but only a phase of it. ([Location 1398](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1398)) - Inasmuch as gardens do not conclude with a harvest and are not played for a certain outcome, one never arrives anywhere with a garden. A garden is a place where growth is found. ([Location 1409](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1409)) - “The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes” (Proust). ([Location 1423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1423)) - A gardener, whose attention is ever on the spontaneities of nature, acquires the gift of seeing differences, looks always for the merest changes in plant growth, or in the composition of the soil, the emerging populations of insects and earthworms. ([Location 1424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1424)) - Waste persons are those no longer useful as resources to a society for whatever reason, and have become apatrides, or noncitizens. Waste persons must be placed out of view—in ghettos, slums, reservations, camps, retirement villages, mass graves, remote territories, strategic hamlets—all places of desolation, and uninhabitable. We live in a century whose Master Players have created many millions of such “superfluous persons” (Rubenstein). A people does not become superfluous by itself, any more than natural waste creates itself. It is society that declares some persons to be waste. Human trash is not an unfortunate burden on a society, an indirect result of its proper conduct; it is its direct product. ([Location 1461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1461)) - There is but one infinite game. ([Location 1616](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1616))  ## Highlights - A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. ([Location 37](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=37)) - It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play. ([Location 48](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=48)) - we can speak of finite games as having temporal boundaries ([Location 51](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=51)) - Infinite players cannot say when their game began, nor do they care. They do not care for the reason that their game is not bounded by time. Indeed, the only purpose of the game is to prevent it from coming to an end, to keep everyone in play. ([Location 77](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=77)) - There are no spatial or numerical boundaries to an infinite game. No world is marked with the barriers of infinite play, and there is no question of eligibility since anyone who wishes may play an infinite game. While finite games are externally defined, infinite games are internally defined. The time of an infinite game is not world time, but time created within the play itself. Since each play of an infinite game eliminates boundaries, it opens to players a new horizon of time. ([Location 79](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=79)) - Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game. ([Location 85](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=85)) - In the narrowest sense rules are not laws; they do not mandate specific behavior, but only restrain the freedom of the players, allowing considerable room for choice within those restraints. ([Location 92](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=92)) - The rules of an infinite game must change in the course of play. The rules are changed when the players of an infinite game agree that the play is imperiled by a finite outcome—that is, by the victory of some players and the defeat of others. The rules of an infinite game are changed to prevent anyone from winning the game and to bring as many persons as possible into the play. ([Location 103](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=103)) - Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries. ([Location 120](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=120)) - Since finite games are played to be won, players make every move in a game in order to win it. Whatever is not done in the interest of winning is not part of the game. The constant attentiveness of finite players to the progress of the competition can lead them to believe that every move they make they must make. ([Location 127](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=127)) - To account for the large gap between the actual freedom of finite players to step off the field of play at any time and the experienced necessity to stay at the struggle, we can say that as finite players we somehow veil this freedom from ourselves. Some self-veiling is present in all finite games. Players must intentionally forget the inherently voluntary nature of their play, else all competitive effort will desert them. ([Location 138](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=138)) - The issue here is not whether self-veiling can be avoided, or even should be avoided. Indeed, no finite play is possible without it. The issue is whether we are ever willing to drop the veil and openly acknowledge, if only to ourselves, that we have freely chosen to face the world through a mask. ([Location 157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=157)) - Since finite games can be played within an infinite game, infinite players do not eschew the performed roles of finite play. On the contrary, they enter into finite games with all the appropriate energy and self-veiling, but they do so without the seriousness of finite players. ([Location 168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=168)) - To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself. ([Location 181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=181)) - Surprise is a crucial element in most finite games. If we are not prepared to meet each of the possible moves of an opponent, our chances of losing are most certainly increased. It is therefore by surprising our opponent that we are most likely to win. Surprise in finite play is the triumph of the past over the future. ([Location 207](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=207)) - Infinite players, on the other hand, continue their play in the expectation of being surprised. If surprise is no longer possible, all play ceases. Surprise causes finite play to end; it is the reason for infinite play to continue. ([Location 212](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=212)) - To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated. Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition. Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future. 18 ([Location 224](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=224)) - What one wins in a finite game is a title. A title is the acknowledgment of others that one has been the winner of a particular game. ([Location 228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=228)) - Death in life is a mode of existence in which one has ceased all play; there is no further striving for titles. All competitive engagement with others has been abandoned. ([Location 249](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=249)) - Life in death concerns those who are titled and whose titles, since they are timeless, may not be extinguished by death. ([Location 254](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=254)) - What the winners of finite games achieve is not properly an afterlife but an afterworld, not continuing existence but continuing recognition of their titles. ([Location 263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=263)) - This is a contradiction common to all finite play. Because the purpose of a finite game is to bring play to an end with the victory of one of the players, each finite game is played to end itself. The contradiction is precisely that all finite play is play against itself. ([Location 280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=280)) - The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish. ([Location 313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=313)) - Power is always measured in units of comparison. In fact, it is a term of competition: How much resistance can I overcome relative to others? Power is a concept that belongs only in finite play. But power is not properly measurable until the game is completed—until the designated period of time has run out. During the course of play we cannot yet determine the power of the players, because to the degree that it is genuine play the outcome is unknown. ([Location 345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=345)) - one does not win by being powerful; one wins to be powerful. ([Location 352](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=352)) - Infinite players do not oppose the actions of others, but initiate actions of their own in such a way that others will respond by initiating their own. ([Location 375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=375)) - Power is finite in amount. Strength cannot be measured, because it is an opening and not a closing act. Power refers to the freedom persons have within limits, strength to the freedom persons have with limits. ([Location 380](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=380)) - Evil is not the termination of a finite game. Finite players, even those who play for their own lives, know the stakes of the games they freely choose to play. Evil is not the attempt to eliminate the play of another according to published and accepted rules, but to eliminate the play of another regardless of the rules. ([Location 395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=395)) - NO ONE CAN PLAY a game alone. One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others. ([Location 412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=412)) - As we shall see, this ceaseless change does not mean discontinuity; rather change is itself the very basis of our continuity as persons. Only that which can change can continue: this is the principle by which infinite players live. ([Location 417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=417)) - how to contain the serious within the truly playful; that is, how to keep all our finite games in infinite play. ([Location 424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=424)) - When Bismarck described politics as the art of the possible, he meant, of course, that the possible is to be found somewhere within fixed limits, within social realities. He plainly did not mean that the possible extended to those limits themselves. Such a politics is therefore seriousness itself, especially since politicians of nearly every ideology represent themselves as champions of freedom, doing what is necessary and even distasteful toward the end of enlarging the range of the possible. ([Location 431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=431)) - The interest of infinite players has little in common with such politics, since they are not concerned to find how much freedom is available within the given realities—for this is freedom only in the trivial sense of playing at—but are concerned to show how freely we have decided to place these particular boundaries around our finite play. ([Location 436](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=436)) - Just as infinite play cannot be contained within finite play, culture cannot be authentic if held within the boundaries of a society. Of course, it is often the strategy of a society to initiate and embrace a culture as exclusively its own. ([Location 465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=465)) - A large society will consist of a wide variety of games—though all somehow connected, inasmuch as they have a bearing on a final societal ranking. ([Location 473](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=473)) - Like a finite game, a society is numerically, spatially, and temporally limited. Its citizenship is precisely defined, its boundaries are inviolable, and its past is enshrined. The power of citizens in a society is determined by their ranking in games that have been played. A society preserves its memory of past winners. Its record-keeping functions are crucial to societal order. Large bureaucracies grow out of the need to verify the numerous entitlements of the citizens of that society. ([Location 478](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=478)) - The prizes won by its citizens can be protected only if the society as a whole remains powerful in relation to other societies. Those who desire the permanence of their prizes will work to sustain the permanence of the whole. Patriotism in one or several of its many forms (chauvinism, racism, sexism, nationalism, regionalism) is an ingredient in all societal play. ([Location 485](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=485)) - Because culture as such can have no temporal limits, a culture understands its past not as destiny, but as history, that is, as a narrative that has begun but points always toward the endlessly open. Culture is an enterprise of mortals, disdaining to protect themselves against surprise. Living in the strength of their vision, they eschew power and make joyous play of boundaries. ([Location 495](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=495)) - One of the most effective means of self-persuasion available to a citizenry is the bestowal of property. Who actually owns a society’s property, and how it is distributed, are far less important than the fact that property exists at all. ([Location 526](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=526)) - Ownership can never be stolen. Titles are timeless, and so is the ownership of property. ([Location 534](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=534)) - Property is an attempt to recover the past. It returns one to precompetitive status. One is compensated for the amount of time spent (and thus lost) in competition. ([Location 571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=571)) - The more powerful we consider persons to be, the less we expect them to do, for their power can come only from that which they have done. ([Location 586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=586)) - Art is not art, therefore, except as it leads to an engendering creativity in its beholders. Whoever takes possession of the objects of art has not taken possession of the art. Since art is never possession, and always possibility, nothing possessed can have the status of art. ([Location 648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=648)) - To regard society as a species of culture is not to overthrow or even alter society, but only to eliminate its perceived necessity. Infinite players have rules; they just do not forget that rules are an expression of agreement and not a requirement for agreement. ([Location 661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=661)) - where a society is defined by its boundaries, a culture is defined by its horizon. ([Location 667](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=667)) - We are never somewhere in relation to the horizon since the horizon moves with our vision. We can only be somewhere by turning away from the horizon, by replacing vision with opposition, by declaring the place on which we stand to be timeless—a sacred region, a holy land, a body of truth, a code of inviolable commandments. To be somewhere is to absolutize time, space, and number. Every move an infinite player makes is toward the horizon. Every move made by a finite player is within a boundary. Every moment of an infinite game therefore presents a new vision, a new range of possibilities. ([Location 678](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=678)) - every new participant in a culture both enters into an existing context and simultaneously changes that context. Each new speaker of its language both learns the language and alters it. Each new adoption of a tradition makes it a new tradition—just as the family into which a child is born existed prior to that birth, but is nonetheless a new family after the birth. ([Location 687](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=687)) - War presents itself as necessary for self-protection, when in fact it is necessary for self-identification. If it is the impulse of a finite player to go against another nation in war, it is the design of an infinite player to oppose war within a nation. ([Location 716](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=716)) - I AM THE GENIUS of myself, the poietes who composes the sentences I speak and the actions I take. It is I, not the mind, that thinks. It is I, not the will, that acts. It is I, not the nervous system, that feels. ([Location 758](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=758)) - Since being your own genius is dramatic, it has all the paradox of infinite play: You can have what you have only by releasing it to others. The sounds of the words you speak may lie on your own lips, but if you do not relinquish them entirely to a listener they never become words, and you say nothing at all. ([Location 766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=766)) - My parents may have wanted a child, but they could not have wanted me. I am both the outcome of my past and the transformation of my past. To be related to the past as its outcome is to stand in causal continuity with it. ([Location 802](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=802)) - In no way is the source of genius external to itself; never is a child moved to genius. Genius arises with touch. Touch is a characteristically paradoxical phenomenon of infinite play. I am not touched by an other when the distance between us is reduced to zero. I am touched only if I respond from my own center—that is, spontaneously, originally. But you do not touch me except from your own center, out of your own genius. Touching is always reciprocal. You cannot touch me unless I touch you in response. ([Location 854](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=854)) - When I am touched, I am touched only as the person I am behind all the theatrical masks, but at the same time I am changed from within—and whoever touches me is touched as well. We do not touch by design. Indeed, all designs are shattered by touching. Whoever touches and whoever is touched cannot but be surprised. ([Location 864](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=864)) - The character of touching can be seen quite clearly in the way infinite players understand both healing and sexuality. If to be touched is to respond from one’s center, it is also to respond as a whole person. To be whole is to be hale, or healthy. In sum, whoever is touched is healed. The finite player’s interest is not in being healed, or made whole, but in being cured, or made functional. Healing restores me to play, curing restores me to competition in one or another game. Physicians who cure must abstract persons into functions. They treat the illness, not the person. And persons willfully present themselves as functions. ([Location 868](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=868)) - When I am healed I am restored to my center in a way that my freedom as a person is not compromised by my loss of functions. This means that the illness need not be eliminated before I can be healed. I am not free to the degree that I can overcome my infirmities, but only to the degree that I can put my infirmities into play. I am cured of my illness; I am healed with my illness. ([Location 881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=881)) - Healing, of course, has all the reciprocity of touching. Just as I cannot touch myself, I cannot heal myself. But healing requires no specialists, only those who can come to us out of their own center, and who are prepared to be healed themselves. ([Location 884](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=884)) - Sexuality for the infinite player is entirely a matter of touch. One cannot touch without touching sexually. Because sexuality is a drama of origins, it gives full expression to the genius you are and to the genius of others who participate in that drama. ([Location 886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=886)) - What one wants in the sexual contest is not just to have defeated the other, but to have the defeated other. Sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner’s prize is the defeated opponent. Sexual titles, like all other titles, have appropriately conspicuous emblems. However, only in sexuality do persons themselves become property. In slavery or wage labor what we possess is not the persons of the slaves or the workers, but the products of their labors. In this case, to use Marx’s phrase, persons are abstracted from their labor. But in sexuality persons are abstracted from themselves. ([Location 916](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=916)) - Finite sexuality is a form of theater in which the distance between persons is regularly reduced to zero but in which neither touches the other. ([Location 926](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=926)) - There is one other way in which society is shaped by the tensions of finite sexuality: in its orientation toward property. Since sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner’s prize is the loser, the most desirable form of property is the publicly acknowledged possession of another’s person, a relationship to which the possessed must of course freely consent. ([Location 945](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=945)) - Seductions are designed to come to an end. Time runs out. The play is finished. All that remains is recollection, the memory of a moment, and perhaps a longing for its repetition. Seductions cannot be repeated. Once one has won or lost in a particular finite game, the game cannot be played over. Moments once reached cannot be reached again. Lovers often sustain vivid reminders of extraordinary moments, but they are reminded at the same time of their impotence in recreating them. The appetite for novelty in lovemaking—new positions, the use of drugs, exotic surroundings, additional partners—is only a search for new moments that can live on only in recollection. As with all finite play, the goal of veiled sexuality is to bring itself to an end. ([Location 956](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=956)) - Seductions cannot be repeated. Once one has won or lost in a particular finite game, the game cannot be played over. ([Location 957](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=957)) - By contrast, infinite players have no interest in seduction or in restricting the freedom of another to one’s own boundaries of play. ([Location 962](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=962)) - Sexuality is not a bounded phenomenon but a horizonal phenomenon for infinite players. One can never say, therefore, that an infinite player is homosexual, or heterosexual, or celibate, or adulterous, or faithful—because each of these definitions has to do with boundaries, with circumscribed areas and styles of play. Infinite players do not play within sexual boundaries, but with sexual boundaries. They are concerned not with power but with vision. In their sexual play they suffer others, allow them to be as they are. Suffering others, they open themselves. Open, they learn both about others and about themselves. Learning, they grow. What they learn is not about sexuality, but how to be more concretely and originally themselves, to be the genius of their own actions, to be whole. Moving therefore from an original center, the sexual engagements of infinite players have no standards, no ideals, no marks of success or failure. Neither orgasm nor conception is a goal in their play, although either may be part of the play. ([Location 965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=965)) - There is nothing hidden in infinite sexuality. Sexual desire is exposed as sexual desire and is never therefore serious. Its satisfaction is never an achievement, but an act in a continuing relationship, and therefore joyous. Its lack of satisfaction is never a failure, but only a matter to be taken on into further play. ([Location 973](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=973)) - Infinite sexuality does not focus its attention on certain parts or regions of the body. Infinite lovers have no “private parts.” They do not regard their bodies as having secret zones that can be exposed or made accessible to others for special favors. It is not their bodies but their persons they make accessible to others. The paradox of infinite sexuality is that by regarding sexuality as an expression of the person and not the body, it becomes fully embodied play. It becomes a drama of touching. The triumph of finite sexuality is to be liberated from play into the body. The essence of infinite sexuality is to be liberated into play with the body. In finite sexuality I expect to relate to you as a body; in infinite sexuality I expect to relate to you in your body. Infinite lovers conform to the sexual expectations of others in a way that does not expose something hidden, but unveils something in plain sight: that sexual engagement is a poiesis of free persons. In this exposure they emerge as the persons they are. They meet others with their limitations, and not within their limitations. In doing so they expect to be transformed—and are transformed. ([Location 983](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=983)) - A FINITE GAME OCCURS within a world. The fact that it must be limited temporally, numerically, and spatially means that there is something against which the limits stand. There is an outside to every finite game. Its limits are meaningless unless there is something to be limited, unless there is a larger space, a longer time, a greater number of possible competitors. There is nothing about a finite game, in itself, that determines at what time it is to be played, or by whom, or where. ([Location 993](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=993)) - A world provides an absolute reference without which the time, place, and participants make no sense. ([Location 1002](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1002)) - The fact that a finite game needs an audience before which it can be played, and the fact that an audience needs to be singularly absorbed in the events before it, show the crucial reciprocity of finite play and the world. Finite players need the world to provide an absolute reference for understanding themselves; simultaneously, the world needs the theater of finite play to remain a world. ([Location 1020](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1020)) - players only so much time to win their titles. Early in a game time seems abundant, and there appears a greater freedom to develop future strategies. Late in a game, time is rapidly being consumed. As choices become more limited they become more important. Errors are more disastrous. ([Location 1043](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1043)) - For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have time to be free. ([Location 1048](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1048)) - The passage of time is always relative to that which does not pass, to the timeless. Victories occur in time, but the titles won in them are timeless. Titles neither age nor die. The points of reference for all finite history are signal triumphs meant never to be forgotten: ([Location 1049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1049)) - The infinite player in us does not consume time but generates it. Because infinite play is dramatic and has no scripted conclusion, its time is time lived and not time viewed. As an infinite player one is neither young nor old, for one does not live in the time of another. There is therefore no external measure of an infinite player’s temporality. Time does not pass for an infinite player. Each moment of time is a beginning. Each moment is not the beginning of a period of time. It is the beginning of an event that gives the time within it its specific quality. For an infinite player there is no such thing as an hour of time. There can be an hour of love, or a day of grieving, or a season of learning, or a period of labor. ([Location 1057](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1057)) - For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have the time to be free. For the infinite player in us time is a function of freedom. We are free to have time. A finite player puts play into time. An infinite player puts time into play. ([Location 1066](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1066)) - NATURE IS the realm of the unspeakable. It has no voice of its own, and nothing to say. We experience the unspeakability of nature as its utter indifference to human culture. ([Location 1079](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1079)) - We take nature on as an opponent to be subdued for the sake of civilization. We count among the highest achievements of modern society the development of a technology that allows us to master nature’s vagaries. ([Location 1082](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1082)) - The assumption guiding our struggle against nature is that deep within itself nature contains a structure, an order, that is ultimately intelligible to the human understanding. Since this inherent structure determines the way things change, and is not itself subject to change, we speak of nature being lawful, of repeating itself according to quite predictable patterns. ([Location 1088](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1088)) - While our great skill lies in finding patterns of repetition under the apparent play of accident and chance, less successful civilizations dealt with the threats of natural accident by appealing to supernatural powers for protection. But the voices of the gods proved to be ignorant and false; they have been silenced by the truth. ([Location 1100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1100)) - There is an irony in our silencing of the gods. By presuming to speak for the unspeakable, by hearing our own voice as the voice of nature, we have had to step outside the circle of nature. It is one thing for physics and chemistry to be speaking about nature; it is quite another for physics and chemistry to be the speaking of nature. ([Location 1103](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1103)) - What we thought we read in nature we discover we have read into nature. “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning” (Heisenberg). ([Location 1114](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1114)) - At its root all language has the character of metaphor, because no matter what it intends to be about it remains language, and remains absolutely unlike whatever it is about. ([Location 1124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1124)) - Like explanation, narrative is concerned with a sequence of events and brings its tale to a conclusion. However, there is no general law that makes this outcome necessary. In a genuine story there is no law that makes any act necessary. Explanations place all apparent possibilities into the context of the necessary; stories set all necessities into the context of the possible. Explanation can tolerate a degree of chance, but it cannot comprehend freedom at all. We explain nothing when we say that persons do whatever they do because they choose to do it. On the other hand, causation cannot find a place in narrative. We have not told a story when we show that persons do whatever they do because they were caused to do it—by their genes, their social circumstances, or the influence of the gods. Explanations settle issues, showing that matters must end as they have. Narratives raise issues, showing that matters do not end as they must but as they do. Explanation sets the need for further inquiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew. ([Location 1145](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1145)) - Explanations succeed only by convincing resistant hearers of their error. If you will not hear my explanations until you are suspicious of your own truths, you will not accept my explanations until you are convinced of your error. ([Location 1170](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1170)) - Whoever wins this struggle is privileged with the claim to true knowledge. Knowledge has been arrived at, it is the outcome of this engagement. Its winners have the uncontested power to make certain statements of fact. They are to be listened to. In those areas appropriate to the contests now concluded, winners possess a knowledge that no longer can be challenged. Knowledge, therefore, is like property. It must be published, declared, or in some other way so displayed that others cannot but take account of it. ([Location 1173](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1173)) - The victorious do not speak with the defeated; they speak for the defeated. Husbands speak for wives in the finite family, and parents for their children. Kings speak for the realm, governors for the state, popes for the church. Indeed, the titled, as titled, cannot speak with anyone. ([Location 1188](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1188)) - Infinite speech is that mode of discourse that consistently reminds us of the unspeakability of nature. It bears no claim to truth, originating from nothing but the genius of the speaker. Infinite speech is therefore not about anything; it is always to someone. It is not command, but address. It belongs entirely to the speakable. ([Location 1201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1201)) - Speaker and listener understand each other not because they have the same knowledge about something, and not because they have established a likeness of mind, but because they know “how to go on” with each other ([Location 1214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1214)) - Finite speech informs another about the world—for the sake of being heard. Infinite speech forms a world about the other—for the sake of listening. ([Location 1221](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1221)) - The contradiction of finite speech is that it must end by being heard. The paradox of infinite speech is that it continues only because it is a way of listening. Finite speech ends with a silence of closure. Infinite speech begins with a disclosure of silence. ([Location 1227](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1227)) - A story cannot be obeyed. Instead of placing one body of knowledge against another, storytellers invite us to return from knowledge to thinking, from a bounded way of looking to an horizonal way of seeing. ([Location 1231](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1231)) - WE CONTROL NATURE for societal reasons. The control of nature advances with our ability to predict the outcome of natural processes. ([Location 1264](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1264)) - The alternative attitudes toward nature can be characterized in a rough way by saying that the result of approaching nature as a hostile Other whose designs are basically inimical to our interests is the machine, while the result of learning to discipline ourselves to consist with the deepest discernable patterns of natural order is the garden. ([Location 1273](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1273)) - This is not a garden one lives beside, but a garden one lives within. It is a place of growth, of maximized spontaneity. To garden is not to engage in a hobby or an amusement; it is to design a culture capable of adjusting to the widest possible range of surprise in nature. Gardeners are acutely attentive to the deep patterns of natural order, but are also aware that there will always be much lying beyond their vision. Gardening is a horizonal activity. ([Location 1279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1279)) - The most elemental difference between the machine and the garden is that one is driven by a force which must be introduced from without, the other grown by an energy which originates from within itself. ([Location 1287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1287)) - Our freedom in relation to nature is not the freedom to change nature; it is not the possession of power over natural phenomena. It is the freedom to change ourselves. We are perfectly free to design a culture that will turn on the awareness that vitality cannot be given but only found, that the given patterns of spontaneity in nature are not only to be respected, but to be celebrated. ([Location 1302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1302)) - The paradox in our relation to nature is that the more deeply a culture respects the indifference of nature, the more creatively it will call upon its own spontaneity in response. The more clearly we remind ourselves that we can have no unnatural influence on nature, the more our culture will embody a freedom to embrace surprise and unpredictability. Human freedom is not a freedom over nature; it is the freedom to be natural, that is, to answer to the spontaneity of nature with our own spontaneity. Though we are free to be natural, we are not free by nature; we are free by culture, by history. ([Location 1313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1313)) - The contradiction in our relation to nature is that the more vigorously we attempt to force its agreement with our own designs the more subject we are to its indifference, the more vulnerable to its unseeing forces. The more power we exercise over natural process the more powerless we become before it. ([Location 1318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1318)) - While a machine greatly aids the operator in such tasks, it also disciplines its operator. As the machine might be considered the extended arms and legs of the worker, the worker might be considered an extension of the machine. All machines, and especially very complicated machines, require operators to place themselves in a provided location and to perform functions mechanically adapted to the functions of the machine. To use the machine for control is to be controlled by the machine. ([Location 1325](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1325)) - Most consumer products are “styled” inasmuch as they actually standardize the activity or the taste of the consumer. In a perfect contradiction we are urged to buy a “styled” artifact because others are also buying it—that is, we are asked to express our genius by giving up our genius. ([Location 1333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1333)) - Because we make use of machinery in the belief we can increase the range of our freedom, and instead only decrease it, we use machines against ourselves. ([Location 1336](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1336)) - A machine is not a way of doing something; it stands in the way of doing something. When we use machines to achieve whatever it is we desire, we cannot have what we desire until we have finished with the machine, until we can rid ourselves of the mechanical means of reaching our intended outcome. The goal of technology is therefore to eliminate itself, to become silent, invisible, carefree. We do not purchase an automobile, for example, merely to own some machinery. Indeed, it is not machinery we are buying at all, but what we can have by way of it: a means of rapidly carrying us from one location to another, an object of envy for others, protection from the weather. ([Location 1338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1338)) - When machinery functions perfectly it ceases to be there— ([Location 1346](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1346)) - Finite gardeners, converting agriculture into commerce, “raise” or “produce” animals—or meat products—as though by machine. Animal husbandry is a science, a method of controlling growth. It assumes that animals belong to us. ([Location 1394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1394)) - While machinery is meant to work changes without changing its operators, gardening transforms its workers. One learns how to drive a car, one learns to drive as a car; but one becomes a gardener. Gardening is not outcome-oriented. A successful harvest is not the end of a garden’s existence, but only a phase of it. ([Location 1398](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1398)) - Inasmuch as gardens do not conclude with a harvest and are not played for a certain outcome, one never arrives anywhere with a garden. A garden is a place where growth is found. ([Location 1409](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1409)) - “The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes” (Proust). ([Location 1423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1423)) - A gardener, whose attention is ever on the spontaneities of nature, acquires the gift of seeing differences, looks always for the merest changes in plant growth, or in the composition of the soil, the emerging populations of insects and earthworms. ([Location 1424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1424)) - Waste persons are those no longer useful as resources to a society for whatever reason, and have become apatrides, or noncitizens. Waste persons must be placed out of view—in ghettos, slums, reservations, camps, retirement villages, mass graves, remote territories, strategic hamlets—all places of desolation, and uninhabitable. We live in a century whose Master Players have created many millions of such “superfluous persons” (Rubenstein). A people does not become superfluous by itself, any more than natural waste creates itself. It is society that declares some persons to be waste. Human trash is not an unfortunate burden on a society, an indirect result of its proper conduct; it is its direct product. ([Location 1461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1461)) - There is but one infinite game. ([Location 1616](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004W3FM4A&location=1616))