A dog's predicament

Mr. Bones knew that Willy wasn't long for this world. The cough had been inside him for over six months, and by now there wasn't a chance in hell that he would ever get rid of it. 

...

What was a poor dog to do?

(From ''TIMBUKTU'' by Paul Auster, Faber and Faber, 1999)

Bushido in the 20th Century

''One remarkable difference between the experience of Europe and Japan is, that whereas in Europe, when chivalry was weaned from feudalism and was adopted by the Church, it obtained a fresh lease of life, in Japan no religion was large enough to nourish it, hence when the mother insti-tution, feudalism, was gone, Bushido left an orphan, had to shift for itself.

The present elaborate military organization might take it under its patronage, but we know that modern warfare can afford little room for its continuous growth. Shintoism, which fostered it in its infancy, is itself superannuated. The hoary sages of ancient China are being supplanted by the intellectual parvenu of Bernham and Mill.''

(INAZO NITOBE, ''BUSHIDO, The Classic Portrait of Samurai Martial Culture" Tuttle Publishing, 1969)

Artists against art

"When I visited my old Dada colleague Tristan Tzara in Paris two years ago, he left me these parting words as food for thought for my journey: 'Don't forget that polemics always played a big part in Dada.'

I shall not be able to confine myself within the bounds of academic art-history.

I shall depend above all on my own memories and those of surviving friends.

The dates and facts of those years, the pronouncements, denials and contradictions, the theories and the works of anti-art: these are the signs by which the living Dada movement is known for what it was, an artistic revolt against art.''

 

(From Hans Richter's "Dada, Art and Anti Art".

Thames and Hudson 2016)