It certainly resembles him, this small
pencil likeness of him.
Quickly done, on the deck of the ship:
an enchanting afternoon.
The Ionian Sea all around us.
It resembles him. Still, I remember him as handsomer.
To the point of illness: that’s how sensitive he was,
and it illumined his expression.
Handsomer, he seems to me,
now that my soul recalls him, out of Time.
Out of Time. All these things, they’re very old—
the sketch, and the ship, and the afternoon.
"Ordinary Creature" - Of Monsters and Men
Bob Dylan - "Tell Me That it Isn't True"
Hubert Robert - "Ruins of a Roman Bath with Washerwomen" (~1776)
Guy Davenport on Balthus
“…Both Balthus and Spencer give us the surface of the canvas as a mimesis of natural textures, not paint. In Picasso, Van Gogh, on out to…Pollock, it is paint. The difference is a philosophical one, perhaps even a religious one.
Spencer’s iconography of saws, ironwork, human flesh reseen without the authority of neoclassical conventions, kettles, drying laundry, the location of shadows in naked light, parallels Balthus’s return to a realism of an accomplished eye that demands accuracy of detail and that generalizes nothing.”
- Guy Davenport, from “A Balthus Notebook”
Jeune fille a la fenetre (1955)
Maurice Marinot - "The Great Tulips" Vase (1923)
Francisco de Zurbaran - "The Annunciation" (1650)
"Head of a Woman" - After Leonardo da Vinci (artist unknown)
Arcade Fire - "Wasted Hours"
Danielle Orchard - "Beach Couple" (2020)
Anna Kenneally - "Night Music"
From "Gilead," by Marilynne Robinson
“Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.”
Lael Neale - "All Good Things Will Come to Pass"
Peter Matthiessen, from "The Snow Leopard"
“There is so much that enchants me in this spare, silent place that I move softly so as not to break a spell. Because the taking of life has been forbidden by the Lama of Shey, bharal and wolves alike draw near the monastery. On the hills and in the stone beds of the river are fossils from blue ancient days when all this soaring rock lay beneath the sea. And all about are the prayer stones, prayer flags, prayer wheels, and prayer mills in the torrent, calling on all the elements in nature to join in celebration of the One.
What I hear from my tent is a delicate wind-bell and the river from the east, in this easterly wind that may bring a change in the weather. At daybreak, two great ravens come, their long toes scratching on the prayer walls.”
Kelsey Waldon - "Your Lone Journey"
Floris Verster - Still Life (1914)
From Eric Rohmer's "A Tale of Summer" (1996)
Bonnie Raitt - "Streetlights"
Marilynne Robinson, from Gilead
“As I have said, I think she experienced a good deal of sorrow in those years. I have never asked, but one thing I have learned in my life is what settled, habitual sadness looks like, and when I saw her I thought, Where have you come from, my dear child? She came in during the first prayer and sat in the last pew and looked up at me, and from that moment hers was the only face I saw. I heard a man say once that Christians worship sorrow. That is by no means true. But we do believe there is a sacred mystery in it, it’s fair to say that. There is something in her face I have always felt I must be sufficient to, as if there is a truth in it that tests the meaning of what I say.”