The Thinker as the Ichthyosaur

“In the face of the increasingly materialist and pragmatic orientation of our age … it would not be eccentric in future to contemplate a society in which those who live for the pleasures of the mind will no longer have the right to demand their place in the sun. The writer, the thinker, the dreamer, the poet, the metaphysician, the observer … he who tries to solve a riddle or to pass judgement will become an anachronistic figure, destined to disappear from the face of the earth like the ichthyosaur and the mammoth.”

– Giorgio de Chirico ((From a footnote of this inspiring talk/essay by Jenny Odell that deserves a blog post on its own, but should be read by you in the meantime, anyway. You can tell I liked it by the fact that I even made it through the footnotes.))