Irony and satire (winter) depict a world from which the hero has disappeared, a vision of "unidealized existence".
The Brownian motion of black flies swarming inside their glass universe, as the cow's head decays and the glass gets progressively dirtier, makes this organic machine a compelling vision of existence and Hirst's greatest work of art.
I've always read this novel as Vedanta without the religion — that is, a vision of a thoroughly secular existence in a book that contains not a single Hindu reference but that becomes coherent only if one invokes ideas like maya (illusion), atman (the essential soul) and karma (the moral record that passes on from one life to the next).
And while efforts like The Slow Movement offer a vision of a simpler, quieter existence and opportunities to escape the rat race, such efforts aren't likely to recalibrate the arc of the current 21st century narrative of endless interruption and distraction.
The symphony attempts to portray existence in its entirety in a vision of a stratified cosmos with raw matter at its base and God at its apex.
Hefner's epic struggle, in Jones's eyes, is to keep an almost unbelievably routinized existence — a "vision of perfection" so detailed and constant, we are told, that the Mansion's kitchen displays photographs of his regular meals so they can be replicated exactly each time — from changing.
Shakyamuni explained to his followers his awakened vision of existence and how it works.
This vision of existence is, to modern Western eyes, both peculiar and beguiling.
Take the whining chorus in the media about Mike Tyson: "As long as I can remember, people have been hating boxing because something in the rational, corporate vision of existence doesn't like people hitting each other," he says, the gravel voice accelerating like an engine.
When there was no end in sight -- no end in sightseeing -- and the vacation started to look like a permanent condition of existence, it turned into a vision of leisure hell.
