“A city built on the most correct architectural plan may be shaken suddenly by the uncontrollable force of nature. Humanity is living in such a spiritual city, subject to these sudden disturbances for which neither architects nor mathematicians have made allowance. In one place lies a great wall crumbled to pieces like a card house, in another are the ruins of a huge tower which once stretched to heaven, built on many presumably immortal spiritual pillars. The abandoned churchyard quakes and forgotten graves open and from them rise forgotten ghosts. Spots appear on the sun and the sun grows dark, and what theory can fight with darkness?”
— Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art
This photograph titled "Above photography of tall tree at night time" was taken by Fabrice Villard in Grayan-et-l'Hôpital, France.
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“This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory
+
“Hold on to what is good, even if it is a handful of earth. Hold on to what you believe, even if it is a tree which stands by itself. Hold on to what you must do, even if it is a long way from here. Hold on to life, even when it is easier letting go. Hold on to my hand, even when I have gone away from you.”
soli :: @solisolsoli :: The Surgery, 1979, by Dimitris Anastasiou
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“By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone
As we head into the weekend, three stories lead the news cycle, all of which point to trouble for Trump and the Republicans in the midterms.
First, the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by ICE agents in Houston has turned into a full-blown cover-up. The Department of Homeland Security says that it is investigating the killing even as it allows ICE to issue inconsistent statements contradicted by every eyewitness to the killing. (CNN, Men who witnessed deadly Houston shooting say ICE statement is false, attorney says.)
Meanwhile, ICE and DHS are concealing the identity of the ICE agent who killed Salgado Araujo. More critically, the DHS investigation is effectively freezing out state and local authorities from conducting criminal investigations.
Like all cover-ups that have become public, it will collapse of its own weight. The media is on the hunt, the questioning will not cease, and the evidence will emerge in a drip-drip-drip pattern that will inflict maximum damage on ICE, Trump, and Texas Republicans heading into the midterms.
The killing of Salgado Araujo is a moral outrage, full stop. But the facts are as ugly as they can be. ICE was following the wrong van because it was in a Latino neighborhood, looking for subjects identified as “Hispanic” ICE appeared to engage in racial profiling to stop—and then kill—an innocent victim because he “looked Hispanic” while driving in a heavily Latino neighborhood.
Trump created this awful situation in which a person’s neighborhood or ethnic characteristics can place them in danger of being gunned down for failing to stop as an unmarked car attempted to run the victim’s van off the road.
Whatever Latino voters in Texas voted for in 2024, they did not vote to put their lives in danger for the Trumpian crime of “driving while Latino.”
It is time for the people of Texas to rise up to repudiate the racist policies of ICE, Border Patrol, DHS, Trump, Ken Paxton, and Greg Abbott. Although Texas doesn’t register voters by party, the best available modeling shows more voters lean Democratic than Republican. But Republicans simply turn out more reliably.
We need only motivate the Democratic-leaning majority to show up and vote. If we can do that, Texas Democrats can effect sweeping changes in a state long controlled by the minority party.
Perhaps the killing of Salgado Araujo will be the spark that finally convinces Democrats to show up in historic numbers sufficient to overwhelm decades of Republican gerrymandering.
Second, Trump posted on Truth Social that the ceasefire with Iran was “over.” Trump went on to say that Iran has requested that negotiations resume—a claim denied by Iran. See Al Jazeera, Trump hints at further Iran negotiations after exchange of fire over Hormuz | US-Israel war on Iran. (“Iran denies it requested new talks with US as new attacks threaten the full resumption of war.”)
Trump is so desperate to end the war against Iran that he is lying about the status of negotiations—exposing himself to contradiction and humiliation by Iran. Pathetic.
Meanwhile, oil prices are increasing globally, and gasoline prices are increasing domestically. US News, US Pain at the Pump Worsens After More US-Iran Fighting Lifts Oil Prices
Third, in a tantrum unworthy of a toddler, Trump refused to sign the bipartisan bill designed to make housing more affordable for Americans. See PBS News, Trump says he won’t sign bipartisan housing affordability bill. Trump’s refusal to sign the bill is a protest against the failure of the GOP-controlled Congress to pass the SAVE America voter suppression legislation.
Per the Constitution, the bill will become law in ten days after presentment, despite Trump’s refusal to sign. See The Guardian, Bipartisan housing bill to become law in a matter of hours – even if Trump refuses to sign it.
Trump’s refusal to sign the one piece of legislation that addresses the most significant issue heading into the midterms (affordability) is a self-inflicted wound that Democrats should seize upon at every opportunity.
Maintaining perspective on Trump’s multiple efforts to interfere in the 2026 midterms.
On Friday, major media sources focused on several efforts by Trump to intimidate states into adopting SAVE America Act-like provisions. Collectively, the efforts are unlawful and reprehensible. Chances are good that each effort will either be invalidated or ignored by state officials. The fact that we will likely defeat them is not an excuse of ignoring or minizming the threats.
Still, some of the language and narratives used by the media have been imprecise or misleading. Since there are plenty of outlets telling us to be concerned, I will focus on the practical limits of Trump’s efforts.
The first concerns Trump’s firing of the remaining commissioners of the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The EAC serves as a resource for state officials seeking to follow best practices in election administration and security.
The removal of the commissioners is an outrageous step by Trump that should be condemned by both parties. Despite the absence of commissioners, the EAC’s resources are intact and available on its website, Home | U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
Some commentators and elected officials have suggested that the 2026 midterms will be thrown into chaos because of the firing of the commissioners. That is simply not true.
The EAC has no role in conducting, supervising, or certifying state elections. States run elections. Think of the EAC as a law library available to lawyers in the community. If the librarian is fired, the books are still on the shelves. The research terminals still boot up. The catalog still works. Losing the librarian is a real loss because nobody is restocking, updating, or improving the collection, and eventually that starts to matter. But the library doesn’t go dark, and the lawyers who use it don’t suddenly lose access to the law. The same is generally true of the EAC.
In a similar vein is a letter that the DOJ sent to state officials threatening prosecution if they “knowingly” allow non-citizens to register or vote. See CBS News, DOJ threatens criminal action against states that allow noncitizens to vote.
The threat is silly and empty. If a state official knowingly and willfully allows a non-citizen to register or vote, existing law imposes criminal penalties. See 52 U.S.C. § 20511. (Making it a crime to “knowingly and willfully” submit fraudulent voter registrations.)
In essence, the DOJ letter says, “If you violate existing law, we will prosecute you.” Good! The DOJ should prosecute anyone who “knowingly and willfully” submits fraudulent voter registration forms. If the past is any indication, it is almost always Republicans who do so.
The DOJ’s letter is pure bluster. Every state has procedures and protocols in place to prevent non-citizens from registering to vote. It would be impossible for the DOJ to demonstrate that any state knowingly and willfully submitted fraudulent voter applications from non-citizens. The letter is an empty threat.
So, too, is the threat to deny states FEMA funding for election security if they refuse to adopt election procedures specified by the Trump administration. See Military Daily News, FEMA Ties One-Fifth of States’ Terrorism Prevention Money to New Election Mandates.
But, as noted in the Military Times article above, nearly identical rules threatening to withhold Homeland Security grants were overruled:
The funding mechanism itself has also been tested. In December, a federal judge appointed by Trump blocked the administration’s attempt to withhold these same homeland security grants from states that declined to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. . . . Election-law specialists expect a similar fate this time.
The case for overruling the FEMA rules is even stronger than the DHS rules because “the Constitution does not grant the president any specific powers over elections.”
So, like the firing of the EAC commissioners and the threatening DOJ letter, the FEMA restrictions will not likely impact the 2026 midterms or the 2028 presidential election.
We can take nothing for granted and must resist each of the above voter suppression efforts with all our might. But any report that fails to include an assessment of the likelihood that the effort will succeed is doing a disservice to anxious citizens who are seeking responsible reporting from major media outlets.
In short, nothing Trump has done will throw the midterms into “chaos,” nor will the DOJ engage in prosecutions against blue state election officials if non-citizens manage to register and vote, and FEMA will not be able to withhold funds from blue states. The battle against Trump’s voter suppression measures will be hard fought. But if past is prologue, we can add these measures to 60+ losses Trump has already suffered in delusional pursuit to win the 2020 election.
Concluding Thoughts
There has been a spate of articles in the last week analyzing the perceived woes of the Democratic Party.
Lazy journalism. Clickbait. False equivalency. Republicans posing as neutral observers so they can sow discord.
One party in America is attempting to destroy democracy by undermining constitutional order. The other party is attempting to save democracy but has internal differences over the best path forward. Those two parties are not alike. One is an existential threat to democracy, the other is the only hope for saving it.
It takes effort, focus, and discipline to describe on a daily basis the existential threat posed by Trump and the GOP. It is exhausting to write about that threat without causing readers to tune out. But if journalists for major publications don’t want to put in the effort, they should find another profession.
There is only one political story that matters in America today, and it is not the internal growing pains of the party trying to save democracy.
Don’t let the chatter get you down. Your efforts matter more than anything appearing in the pages and on the websites of media conglomerates. Keep up the good work!
Presumably afraid of investigations into his actions, President Donald J. Trump appears to have abandoned all pretense of governing for the good of the country and is focusing on rigging the 2026 election to keep Republicans in power.
This morning, as the National Association of Realtors reported that U.S. home prices have hit an all-time high, he announced that he will not sign the housing bill, which was designed to address the unaffordability of housing and which passed Congress with strong bipartisan majorities, “in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.”
As the Lincoln Project summed it up, the Republican Party’s message four months before the midterms appears to be, “You’re not getting affordable housing unless you give up your voting rights.”
His demand for the passage of a bill that most observers agree will suppress voting is only one of the ways that Trump is trying to rig the 2026 election.
After federal judges have repeatedly prohibited the administration from seizing state voter lists, apparently to run them through a program designed to identify noncitizens who are not eligible for certain federal programs (something federal judges have also prohibited), Trump’s appointees at the Department of Justice appear to have turned to trying to intimidate election officials.
On Tuesday the Department of Justice confirmed that it has sent letters to election officials in all fifty states and Washington, D.C., warning them that they could be criminally prosecuted if noncitizens vote. The letters came from Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump loyalist, and gave them five days to detail how they will maintain “clean voter lists.”
Utah lieutenant governor Deidre Henderson, a Republican, posted on social media: “Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution. I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts. This is truly bizarre behavior by the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights.”
Last night, Trump fired the last two Democratic members of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), an independent federal commission that helps state and local officials make sure elections are smooth and secure. Among other things, it certifies voting machines and maintains the national mail-voter registration forms. The only other current member of the EAC, a Republican, resigned. The fourth member of the EAC, a Republican, resigned earlier this year.
A White House official told Justin Papp of CNBC that the Supreme Court recognized Trump’s authority to fire the agency officials in its June 29 Trump v. Slaughter decision, which overturned more than 90 years of precedent to rubber stamp the president’s right to fire agency officials who are not aligned with his political agenda.
“The President, and head of the Executive Branch, reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted,” the official told Papp. “The Slaughter decision gives the President precedence to do so.”
Legal analyst Harry Litman says this interpretation of the Slaughter decision is a stretch. He noted that “[n]othing in the agency cases held that Trump could simply shut down an agency of Congress’s creation. That’s what he has done with the [E]lection Assistance [C]ommission which now lacks commissioners to act. It’s taking the court’s cases to the ultimate conclusion and just disabling an important agency.”
The nonpartisan, nonprofit League of Women Voters, which works to protect the right to vote, called the removal of the Election Assistance Commission officials “a direct attack on the independence of our nation’s election infrastructure…. The American people deserve elections administered by trusted professionals, not shaped by political interference. This is not a routine personnel decision—it is a dangerous escalation in the effort to weaken the safeguards that protect free and fair elections in the November midterms.”
This is the backdrop for the news from Betsy Klein and Kaitlan Collins of CNN today that the White House is fortifying the White House entrance at the North Portico during Trump’s renovation of the Ionic columns there.
In March, Trump’s appointee to the Commission on Fine Arts, which advises Trump on design matters, urged replacing the historic Ionic columns with more ornate Corinthian columns that would match the ones Trump picked out for his ballroom. The White House says the work on the North Portico is “standard restoration work,” but did not answer CNN’s question about whether there would be more substantial changes to the North Portico. Trump recently posted pictures of the Corinthian columns at his proposed ballroom, boasting that “When completed, there will be nothing like it anywhere in the World!”
While the focus has been on the historic columns and their possible replacement, it is not until now we have learned about the strengthening of the White House door. The portico is now covered with scaffolding that is covered with a drape, and a White House official told Klein and Collins that the renovations will include security enhancements at the request of the U.S. Secret Service.
Dan Diamond of the Washington Post also reported today that under the Trump administration, the Secret Service, the White House, and the Interior Department are seeking to place permanent eight- to nine-foot-tall fencing around Lafayette Square, where tourists and protesters congregate, in front of the White House. They are also considering fencing off the parts of Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House. In the past, when officials believed it was necessary to shut off access to Lafayette Square, they used temporary barriers to avoid the perception that they were restricting public access to what is known as the People’s House.
Eleanor Holmes Norton, the nonvoting congressional representative from the District of Columbia., objected. “More fencing around the President’s Park would send the wrong message to the nation and the world by continuing to transform our democracy from one that is accessible and of the people to one that is exclusive and fearful of its own citizens,” she said.
Tonight, at 11:59 PM, the housing bill became law without the president’s signature.
Some poetry by our buddy Will Shakespeare, from "The Tempest" Act 5: Prospero is done with his rough magic!
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves;
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid—
Weak masters though ye be—I have bedimm’d
The noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds,
And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs pluck’d up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure; and, when I have required
Some heavenly music,—which even now I do,—
To work mine end upon their senses, that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.
“During the Age of Glass, everyone believed some part of him or her to be extremely fragile. For some it was a hand, for others a femur, yet others believed it was their noses that were made of glass. The Age of Glass followed the Stone Age as an evolutionary corrective, introducing into human relations a new sense of fragility that fostered compassion. This period lasted a relatively short time in the history of love-about a century-until a doctor named Ignacio da Silva hit on the treatment of inviting people to recline on a couch and giving them a bracing smack on the body part in question, proving to them the truth. The anatomical illusion that had seemed so real slowly disappeared and-like so much we no longer need but can't give up-became vestigial. But from time to time, for reasons that can't always be understood, it surfaces again, suggesting that the Age of Glass, like the Age of Silence, never entirely ended.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
Anna’s.album :: from my Great-Aunt’s photo albums on flickr
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Let the place of the solitaires
Be a place of perpetual undulation.
Whether it be in mid-sea
On the dark, green water-wheel,
Or on the beaches,
There must be no cessation
Of motion, or of the noise of motion,
The renewal of noise
And manifold continuation;
And, most, of the motion of thought
And its restless iteration,
In the place of the solitaires,
Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation.
~ Wallace Stevens
“People often say that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ and I say that the most liberating thing about beauty is realizing that you are the beholder. This empowers us to find beauty in places where others have not dared to look, including inside ourselves.”
風を綯う日々-ねじ曲げられるもの The Days of Twining Wind-Things can be bent ed/50 59.5 x 45.0cm 2005年 林孝彦 Takahiko Hayashi copperplate print with chine collé( etching)
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“Something I heard an archaeologist say in Oslo about deep time returns to me: Time isn’t deep, it is always already all around us. The past ghosts us, lies all about us less as layers, more as drift. […] The problem is not that things become buried deep in strata – but that they endure, outlive us, and come back at us with a force we didn’t realise they had. […] We all carry trace fossils within us – the marks that the dead and the missed leave behind. Handwriting on an envelope; the wear on a wooden step left by footfall; the memory of a familiar gesture by someone gone, repeated so often it has worn its own groove in both air and mind: these are trace fossils too. Sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace – and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself.”
— Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey
How to summarize the Iran fiasco? Donald Trump has created a colossal mess that effects not only the US and Iran but has repercussions for the entire world. He has no idea how to clean it up and all the possible options are equally unpalatable.
How confused and unnecessary this debacle is is highlighted by this: When asked if the US might try and seize by force the Iranian's stockpile of enriched uranium, Trump said that that was unnecessary because the material is now buried so far underground (from the American bombing in June 2025) that the Iranians don't have the means necessary to excavate it. If so, this completely undermines Trump's pretext for starting the war with Iran in February 2026 because there was an "imminent threat" that Iran was going to develop a nuclear weapon (!)
This is American politics in the era of Trump: complete self-contradictory madness delivered by a narcissistic lunatic who can't even keep his pretexts straight. And he is supported by a ship of fools known as the Republican Party who pay no heed to his greed, corruption, ineptitude, and dementia. As they say, you couldn't make this up. ~ Christopher Majka
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"Just two weeks ago, opening the Great American State Fair, President Trump triumphantly declared: “For the first time in 3,000 years, we are going to have peace in the Middle East.”
It was typical bravado for Mr. Trump. But the “peace” he was celebrating — the cease-fire with Iran that on Wednesday he declared “over” after less than a month — was already beginning to unravel. The result was perhaps predictable for a 14-paragraph memorandum of understanding that skirted major issues and was hastily assembled so Mr. Trump could declare he had reached a deal, any deal.
Now Mr. Trump appears to be confronting the consequences of his haste, and of his assumption, born of his time in the real estate business, that his adversary would prize economic benefits over the revolutionary ideology that has driven its politics since the 1979 Iranian revolution. That has left him facing a range of unpalatable options amid seemingly intractable sticking points over the fate of Iran’s nuclear program — to say nothing of its missile program, its support for terrorist groups and its repression of its own people.
At the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, on Wednesday after the two sides had exchanged strikes, he threatened major new combat operations. Those included seizing a key Iranian oil processing island and attacking the country’s infrastructure and desalination plants, which experts have said could constitute a war crime. (Mr. Trump did say he was most hesitant to hit the desalination facilities.)
But Mr. Trump has made such threats without following through before, and he added on Wednesday that he did not anticipate a return to full-scale war. Such a move has little domestic support, and some of Mr. Trump’s Republican allies fear the economic and political consequences less than four months before the midterm elections. No one is more aware of that calendar, or Mr. Trump’s hesitation to repeat the experience of the spring, than the Iranian leadership.
The president could instead reimpose the American blockade of Iranian ports, an attempt to cut off the country’s economic lifeline. But that would require a continued, intense American presence in the region, and while Mr. Trump contended in April that it would lead to Iranian economic collapse, his earlier imposition of it did not.
Or he could elect to live in a world of neither war nor peace, an era of episodic skirmishes in the Persian Gulf, punctuated by periodic negotiations, with traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil-shipping route, greatly reduced from the 130 or so ships that passed through each day before the war. The energy markets would most likely adjust; to some degree they already have.
But for a president who promised a quick, cost-free confrontation with an old adversary — “four to six weeks” was the White House prediction in the opening weeks — an ongoing conflict would amount to near-total failure on the mission he initially set out upon. And the price would be staggering: The Pentagon has already asked Congress for about $70 billion to cover the early operations around Iran, and the cost rises every week.
“The problem is that all the options — endure, escalate or agree — are unattractive in different ways,” Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security and a former aide to Senator John McCain, said on Wednesday. “The likeliest outcome is a continuing series of low-level, tit-for-tat attacks, followed by frantic diplomacy by mediators, the emergence of a new and fragile cease-fire, and then probably another round of strikes.
Mr. Fontaine added: “It will be a long oscillation between cold war and low-level hot war.”
Many of the problems Mr. Trump is facing today were exacerbated by the cease-fire deal itself. It left unresolved, for a later negotiation that Mr. Trump now says he has little interest in pursuing, the fate of Iran’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade nuclear fuel, the most prominent among the administration’s shifting reasons for attacking Iran on Feb. 28.
The agreement appeared to hand Iran at least some control over passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the superweapon that Tehran, and specifically the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, has skillfully manipulated to drive up oil prices, and now has used to justify attacks on tankers and cargo ships not hewing to its new rules.
“What we’re seeing now is Iran, and more specifically the I.R.G.C., trying to exert control over the strait and declaring that this control is their sovereign right,” said Kevin Donegan, a retired Navy vice admiral who served as a Navy commander in the Middle East. “That’s the main card they have to play, and as a result we can expect they will continue to try to disrupt any ship traffic that uses routes different from the ones they have published.”
The deal was silent on Iran’s missile arsenal, the key issue for Israel. And it depended on a cease-fire in Lebanon, though the parties to that conflict, Israel and Hezbollah, were not signatories of the agreement. And it set an unrealistic deadline, 60 days, to deal diplomatically with those and other issues that months of active combat had failed to resolve.
There are, of course, many more turns ahead in this drama. Mr. Trump threatened again on Wednesday to try to seize Kharg Island, where giant tankers collect Iran’s oil and head to world markets. He may seek to seize the 60 percent enriched nuclear material deep underground at Isfahan, a mission for which Special Operations forces have trained extensively, though he dismissed the need for it on Wednesday.
“We’ve already got the nuclear material, because it’s so far underground,” he said, noting that the Iranians do not have the heavy equipment needed to unearth it.
If Mr. Trump is right about that, and many nuclear experts agree that the material would be enormously difficult to recover, it raises a fundamental question: If the nuclear fuel was successfully buried in the June 2025 American bombing of three major nuclear sites, why did he go to war to begin with? His statement on Wednesday, a repeat of comments he has made several times in recent months, undercuts the argument he made in the days after the initial attack in February that there was an “imminent” threat.
That initial justification has been overtaken by subsequent contradictions. Mr. Trump has periodically praised the new Iranian leadership, and even its new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the slain ayatollah, as more “reasonable.” He has said many times that, unlike their predecessors, the new leaders would open up the strait and dilute the nuclear stockpile because it will be in their economic interest.
Vice President JD Vance sounded exactly that note last month, when he was signing the memorandum of understanding in Switzerland.
“The coolest thing about the progress we’ve made over the last few weeks is that you see people within the Iranian system, senior leadership, even I.R.G.C. officials say, ‘You know what, we may have some animosity, we may have some mistrust, but we recognize the way that we’ve done business with the United States for 47 years is a mistake,’” he said.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump had a different word for those leaders: “scum.”
“They are sick people. They’re led by sick people, and they’re vicious, violent people,” he said, adding: “As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them.”
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a New York Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
“All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. My problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?”
- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Eyes and Eggs, 1983, Jean-Michel Basquiat :: Medium: pencil,paper,cotton
* * * *
"Even if you're going to live three thousand more years, or ten times that, remember: you cannot lose another life than the one you're living now, or live another one than the one you're losing. The longest amounts to the same as the shortest. The present is the same for everyone; its loss is the same for everyone; and it should be clear that a brief instant is all that is lost. For you can't lose either the past or the future; how could you lose what you don't have?"
