« The head of state VRP on an official visit to a foreign country must visit with his wife in the kindergarten or refugee camp, for the evening news. Unbearable would be the logic of interest without our daily lot of touching and disinterested nobility. One day we will have to return to the crucial role of photography in public action, where no one can be loved without being seen, alone or in a selfie. (p. 124) »

« But the most beautiful example of autumn blooms, of these creative bubbling of the great age, is Vienna, between 1870 and 1830, the head of a decrepit Austro-Hungarian empire, the last successor of the Western Roman Empire, five centuries of existence. Everything was going badly in this country beaten by Prussia at Sadowa, spread by internal nationalisms, with a court burdened with dramas and suicides, and a phantom turning emperor, when Vienna became the capital of the objective spirit of the Western world. Under the marks of operetta and waltzes, Mayerling and Sisi, the high culture of Vienna laid the foundations for all the inventions of the century. And this great era began curiously in 1871, when the political and military center of continental Europe moved from Vienna to Berlin, forcing the Crown to abdicate any dominant role internationally. The Autriae finish in the European arena foreshadowed the Europae finish in the world arena, and this dress rehearsal could make us envy, as this Happy Apocalypse has not only illuminated its century, but fruitful the next. We are all children, if not parasites, still now, of the ring, of the circle of Vienna, cafes, galleries, clubs, magazines, cabarets, agencies of this irreplaceable "decadence". The Viennese Who's Who of the Belle époque is half the pantheon of the year 2000. Painting: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele. Architecture: Adolf Loos, Otto Wagner. Music: Alban Ber, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern. Humanities: Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Joseph Schumpeter, William Reich. Literature: Robert Musil, Stephan Zsweig, Hermann Broch, Karl Kraus, Manès Sperber. Cinema: Fritz Lang, Joseph von Sternberg, Erich von Stroheim, Michael Curtiz. Hollywood would not be what it is if it had not hosted these civilizers, nor would London, Harvard and Paris. What ism should be preceded by the austro prefix? Zionism, Marxism, positivism, expressionism, etc. Who says that getting out of history forces you to grind black? Quite the contrary: these periods of pomp and conclusive are those when melancholy at the heart does not prevent cheerfulness in the mind; where the art of living is so far pushed that some may live from art, and for it; where it is no longer necessary to hope to undertake or even to undertake to say thank you; where convictions lose their blind strength, reality is discovered in spirits, without addition or disguise; where corsets fade and caps fly over the forbidden. The collective loses, the individual wins. Decadence, one will say, liberation, will say the other. And why not both? »

« In 1919, there was a European civilization, with an American culture as a variant. There is, in 2017, an American civilization, whose European cultures seem, with all their diversity, at best, variables of adjustment, at worst, of indigenous reserves. »