"The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star." -Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

"According to Aristotle, a child does not begin to laugh before the fortieth day after his birth; only from that moment does it become a human being." -Bakhtin, Rabelais In the History of Laughter