April 2013
2 posts
Blush is the Court.: Gaiety to the Gait: Charles LeMaire's Follies & Gatsby in the Details →
blushisthecourt.tumblr.com
“Beauty, of course, is the most important requirement and paramount asset…” ~Florenz Ziegfeld
Although of late there have been ample assessments of current trends as Gatsbyesque, such verdicts—perhaps unanimously courting the “single green light, minute and…
October 2012
1 post
“Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.” ~ Jean Baudrillard.”
—
September 2012
2 posts
“The girl who gets up from her desk and dumbs
her discourse down has never seen the flight
of wide-eyed starlings from their shabby cage” —Rachael Wetzsteon, Love and Work.
her discourse down has never seen the flight
of wide-eyed starlings from their shabby cage” —Rachael Wetzsteon, Love and Work.
August 2012
6 posts
“When I die, I will see the lining of the world.
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
The true meaning, ready to be decoded.
What never added up will add Up,
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.
- And if there is no lining to the world?
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?
- Even if that is so, there will remain
A word wakened by lips that perish,
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,
And calls out, protests, screams.” —Czesław Miłosz
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
The true meaning, ready to be decoded.
What never added up will add Up,
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.
- And if there is no lining to the world?
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?
- Even if that is so, there will remain
A word wakened by lips that perish,
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,
And calls out, protests, screams.” —Czesław Miłosz
“
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.
“Never has there been a close study of how necessary to a man are the experiences which we clumsily call aesthetic. Such experiences are associated with works of art for only an insignificant number of individuals. The majority find pleasure of an aesthetic nature in the mere fact of their existence within the stream of life.”
—Czesław Miłosz
“And when people cease to believe that there is good and evil,
Only beauty will call to them and save them
So that they will know how to say: this is true and that is false.” —Czesław Miłosz
Only beauty will call to them and save them
So that they will know how to say: this is true and that is false.” —Czesław Miłosz
“Of all things broken and lost, porcelain troubles me most.”
—Czesław Miłosz
January 2012
10 posts
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“We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.”
—Lionel Trilling
“I marmaladed a slice of toast with something of a flourish and I don’t suppose I have ever come much closer to saying ‘Tra la la’ as I did the lathering for I was feeling in mid season form this morning.”
—― P.G. Wodehouse
“Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.”
—
Theodor Adorno
“One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.”
—
Jean-Luc Godard
“Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.”
—Denis Diderot
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“The hours on the road led inexorably to the bridge from where I could finally see the remains of the day.”
—Patrick Yaeger
“The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.”
—Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
December 2011
18 posts
“
“There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, ‘Do trousers matter?’”
“The mood will pass, sir.”
” —― P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters
“We should always endeavor to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake, and wonder more at the earth.”
—G. K. Chesterton
“The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder.”
—G. K. Chesterton
“There are two ways of getting home and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place.”
—G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man.
“I do not believe that the past is most truly pictured as a thing in which humanity merely fades away into nature, or civilization merely fades away into barbarism, or religion fades away into mythology, or our own religion fades away into the religions of the world. In short I do not believe that the best way to produce an outline of history is to rub out the lines.”
—~G. K. Chesterton.
Play
Play
Play
“The color of truth is gray.”
—Andre Gide
“Je suis l’Empire à la fin de la Décadence,
Qui regarde passer les grands Barbares blancs
En composant des acrostiches indolents
D’un style d’or où la langueur du soleil danse.” —Paul Verlaine. Langueur.
Qui regarde passer les grands Barbares blancs
En composant des acrostiches indolents
D’un style d’or où la langueur du soleil danse.” —Paul Verlaine. Langueur.
“I am the Empire at the end of the decadence.”
—
Paul Verlaine
“In Spanish there is a word for which I can’t find a counterword in English. It is the verb vacilar, present participle vacilando. It does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere, but does not greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction. Everything in the world must have a design or the human mind rejects it. But in addition, it must have purpose or the human conscience shies away from it.”
—John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley.
“I’ve lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.”
—
John Steinbeck
“Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world!”
—Vladimir Nabokov
“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness-in a landscape selected at random-is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern-to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory.
November 2011
21 posts
“Stories about places are makeshift things. They are composed with the world’s debris……Things extra and other (details and excesses coming from elsewhere) insert themselves into the accepted framework, the imposed order. One thus has the very relationship between spatial practices and the constructed order. The surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order.”
—~Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life, 2002.
“Synecdoche expands a spatial element in order to make it play the role of a ‘more’ (a totality) and take its place….Asyndeton, by elision, creates a ‘less,’ opens a gap in the spatial continuum, and retains only selected parts of it that amount almost to relics. Synecdoche replaces totalities by fragments (a less in place of a more); asyndeton disconnects them by eliminating the conjunctive or the consecutive (nothing in place of something). Synecdoche makes more dense: it amplifies the detail and miniaturizes the whole. Asyndeton cuts out: it undoes continuity and undercuts its plausibility. A space treated in this way and shaped by practices is transformed into enlarged singularities and separate islands. Through these swellings, shrinking, and fragmentations, that is, through these rhetorical operations a spatial phrasing of an analogical (composed of juxtaposed citations) and elliptical…type is created.”
—~Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life, 2002.
“Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.”
—Isaac Newton
“E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle…”
—Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri, Inferno XXXIV, 139.
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is headed for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).”
—Vladimir Nabokov
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
—T. S. Eliot
“At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor, Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds. I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: To glorify things just because they are.”
—Czeslaw Milosz
“Astronomers are greatly disappointed when, having traveled halfway around the world to see an eclipse, clouds prevent a sight of it; and yet a sense of relief accompanies the disappointment.”
—Simon Newcomb
