Carel Visser - Cube and Its Piling Up, 1967
Black Sabbath - "Orchid"
Trina Schart Hyman from "Two Queens of Heaven"
Four from "Near Orouët" (Du côté d'Orouët) - Jacques Rozier, 1971
Jack Whitten - 'Quantum Wall VIII (for Arshile Gorky, My First Love in Painting' (2017)
Jeff Aeling - "Pond East of Dodge City, KS" (2009)
Musette tendre en rondeau from Jean-Phillipe Rameau's "Les fetes d'Hebe"
Van Morrison - "Almost Independence Day"
Jessica Williams - "The Weapon of Truth"
Arthur Schopenhauer on the soul, from "On The Suffering of the World"
The present has two halves: an objective and a subjective. The objective half alone has the intuition of time as its form and thus streams irresistibly away; the subjective half stands firm and thus is always the same. It is from this that there originates our lively recollection of what is long past and, despite our knowledge of the fleetingness of our existence, the consciousness of our immortality.
Whenever we may live we always stand, with our consciousness, at the central point of time, never at its termini, and we may deduce from that that each of us bears within him the unmoving mid-point of the whole of endless time. It is fundamentally this which gives us the confidence to live without being in continual dread of death.
He who, by virtue of the strength of his memory and imagination, can most clearly call up what is long past in his own life will be more conscious than others of the identity of all present moments throughout the whole of time. Through this consciousness of the identity of all present moments one apprehends that which is most fleeting of all, the moment, as that alone which persists. And he who, in such intuitive fashion, becomes aware that the present, which is in the strictest sense the sole form of reality, has its source in us, and thus arises from within and not from without, cannot doubt the indestructibility of his own being. He will understand, rather, that although when he dies the objective world, with the medium through which it presents itself, the intellect, will be lost to him, his existence will not be affected by it; for there has been as much reality within him as without.
Katherine Lewis - "Swimmers" (2024)
Anna Wintour, 1988
Photo by Ron Galella / Getty Images
From Thornton Wilder's "Our Town"
Now there are some things we all know, but we don't take'm out and look at ‘em very often. We all know that something is eternal. Arid it ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth, and it ain't even the stars ...
Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you'd be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There's something way down deep that's eternal about every human being.
You know as well as I do that the dead don't stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they lose hold of the earth ... and the ambitions they had ... and the pleasures they had ... and the things they suffered ... and the people they loved. They get weaned away from earth—that's the way I put it…weaned away.”
- Narrator’s monologue from Act III of “Our Town”, by Thornton Wilder
James Wright - "Sun Tan at Dusk"
When was the last time
You remembered you
Had gone out? A bee
Blew past me. Jays
Raised hell down stream,
You rose up
Slow out of the mountain pool.
Color of doe out of green
Against dark.
The fawn’s honey weeping down stream.
I just got up. This is
When I wake.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir - "Young Woman with Raised Arms" (1895)
From "Stella Maris" - Cormac McCarthy
"I'd have thought that the signature image of our age might better be the NASA photograph of the earth taken from space. That beautiful blue sphere turning in the void."
- Interesting juxtaposition, isn't it?
"You don't find that photograph moving?"
- I find it frightening.
Gerhard Richter - "Four Paintings"
Dorf (Village) - 1988
Verwaltungsgebäude (Administrative Building), 1964
Fenster (Window), 2002
Lesende (Reader), 1994