February 2012
16 posts
An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.
—Herman Melville.
I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the single...
Turjan sighed and left the room. He mounted winding stone stairs and at last came out on the roof of his castle Miir, high above the river Derna. In the west the sun hung close to old earth; ruby shafts, heavy and rich as red wine, slanted past the gnarled boles of the archaic forest to lay on the turfed forest floor. The sun sank in accordance with the old ritual; latter-day night fell across the...
The coping mechanisms of the migratory only serve to prove there is something wrong with them, something sinister. They cluster together, sometimes creating their own little neighborhoods. They want to bring their own food. They are relieved to find others with whom they can converse in their native language. It is difficult to fit into another people’s structure. Every default decision you try to...
In the drama of the dream, pathology is an evolving, shifting character. It hides in the blind spots…When it hid in the shadows, you reacted to it reflexively: you were thrown into panic or spoke cruelly or skulked in shame or acted out of guilt and had no idea why.
I don’t want to underestimate the trickiness or shiftiness of the pathology even as it begins to appear in the open. It...
A skeuomorph /ˈskjuːəmɔrf/ skew-ə-morf, or skeuomorphism (Greek: skeuos—vessel or tool, morphe—shape),is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original. Skeuomorphs may be deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar, such as copper cladding on zinc pennies or computer printed postage with circular town name and...
For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, “This is what I have made of it! This!” And what had she made of it? What, indeed?
—Virginia Woolf.
It is the way of dreams to give us more than we ask…The view that dreams are merely the imaginary fulfillments of repressed wishes is hopelessly out of date. There are, it is true, dreams which manifestly represent wishes or fears, but what about all the other things? Dreams may contain ineluctable truths, philosophical pronouncements, illusions, wild fantasies, memories, plans, ...
Pray, for what do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our exuviœ: at last to go from this world to another newly furnished, and leave this to be burned? It is the same as if all these traps were buckled to a man’s belt, and he could not move over the rough country where our lines are cast without dragging them—dragging his trap. He was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smr_dGw2ZwU →
Sub specie aeternitatis ? or sub speciegenerationis ? I am susceptible to the aesthetic charm of the former ideal — who is not ? There are moments of relaxation: there are moments when the demand for peace, to be let alone and relieved from the continual claim of the world in which we live that we be up and doing something about it, seems irresistible ; when the...