It was, I think, about six months after Adam learned to walk that he began to experiment with walking backwards. Walking backwards goes against our social bodily image, which aligns our face with our motion. For just that reason, it ends up, for a child, in the realm of play. Since learning to walk backwards, Adam indulges in it not so frequently, but always with a giggle and a sideglance at his parents, because he feels he is doing something a bit naughty. The image of the oarsman that I’ve excavated from Montaigne and from Pliny exerts, to my mind, a marvelous poetic power as a model that tells us something about the course of a life or a history partly because it stands in suprising contrast to our rooted association of facial direction and forward motion. Of course, the sightless oarsman is looking, but only at what recedes behind him. In considering this image, one has to recall, as well, the socio-economic system in which the slave oarsmen in Pliny’s time, or the oarsmen
“I’m so bored. I hate my life.” - Britney Spears
Das Langweilige ist interessant geworden, weil das Interessante angefangen hat langweilig zu werden. – Thomas Mann
"Never for money/always for love" - The Talking Heads