After Babel

[vintageski]

American alpine ski racer and environmentalist Andrea Mead Lawrence in Cortina, Italy, 1956.

She competed in three Winter Olympics: 1948, 1950, and after giving birth to three children, one more time in 1956.

She was inducted into the National Ski Hall of Fame in 1958.

[exhaled-spirals]

« It is not enough for two people to find each other, it is also very important that they find each other at the right moment and hold deep, quiet festivals in which their desires merge so that they can fight as one against storms. How many people have parted ways because they did not find the time slowly to grow close to each other?

Before two people can experience unhappiness together, they have to have been blissful together and possess a sacred memory of that time, which evokes a kindred smile on their lips and a kindred longing in their souls. They become like children who have lived through the festivities of a Christmas night together; when they find a few minutes to catch their breath during the pale, drawn-out days, they will sit down together and tell each other with glowing cheeks about that pin-tree-scented nighttime full of sparkling lights…

Such people will weather all storms together. »

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters

[ecbook]

[banksalec]

[petersbourgeoises]

“Is the scene always visual? It can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: I can fall in love with a sentence spoken to me: and not only because it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.”

— Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

[karrova]

A Fragmentary Roman Marble Torso of Aphrodite Untying her Sandal, circa 2nd Century A.D.

[vintageski]

Skiing with The Eiger in the background, Switzerland.

[thethirdromana]

Just learned this absolutely delightful bit of etymology:

During the 15th century, the English had an endearing practice of granting common human names to the birds that lived among them. Virtually every bird in that era had a name, and most of them, like Will Wagtail and Philip Sparrow have been long forgotten. Polly Parrot has stuck around, and Tom Tit and Jenny Wren, personable companions of the English countryside, are names still sometimes found in children’s rhymes. Other human names, however, have been incorporated so durably into the common names that still grace birds as to almost entirely obscure their origin. The Magpie, a loquacious black and white bird with a penchant for snatching shiny objects, once bore the simple name “pie,” probably coming from its Roman name, “pica.” The English named these birds Margaret, which was then abbreviated to Maggie, and finally left at Mag Pie. The vocal, crow-like bird called Jackdaw was also once just a “daw” named “Jack.”  The English also gave their ubiquitous and beloved orange-bellied, orb-shaped, wren-sized bird a human name. The first recorded Anglo-Saxon name for the Eurasian Robin was ruddoc, meaning “little red one.” By the medieval period, its name evolved to redbreast (the more accurate term orange only entered the English language when the fruit of the same name reached Great Britain in the 16th century). The English chose the satisfyingly alliterative name Robert for the redbreast, which they then changed to the popular Tudor nickname Robin. Soon enough, the name Robin Redbreast became so identified with the bird that Redbreast was dropped because it seemed so redundant. 

[polspiration]

[plum-japonais]

Ralph Lauren Spring 2005

[antronaut]

Barbara Hepworth - Oval Sculpture (No. 2 ). 1943/1958

[pearlmarley]

there is no outcome, only eternal unfolding

[dead-molchun]

Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572) Portrait of Lucrezia de’ Medici, 1560.  

[fernand0adnan]

[nousrose]

The Zen approach is to enter right into the object itself and see it, as it were, from the inside. To know the flower is to become the flower, to be the flower, to bloom as the flower, and to enjoy the sunlight as well as the rainfall. When this is done, the flower speaks to me and I know all its secrets, all its joys, all its sufferings; that is, all its life vibrating within itself. Not only that: along with my "knowledge" of the flower I know all the secrets of the universe, which includes all the secrets of my own Self, which has been eluding my pursuit all my life so far, because I divided myself into a duality, the pursuer and the pursued, the object and the shadow. No wonder that I never succeeded in catching my Self, and how exhausting this game was! Now, however, by knowing the flower I know my Self. That is, by losing myself in the flower I know my Self as well as the flower. I call this kind of approach to reality the Zen way, the antescientific or metascientific or even antiscientific way. This way of knowing or seeing reality may also be called conative of creative. While the scientific way kills, murders the object and by dissecting the corpse and putting the parts together again tries to reproduce the original living body, which is really a deed of impossibility, the Zen way takes life as it is lived instead of chopping it to pieces and tying to restore its life by intellection, or in abstraction gluing the broken pieces together. The Zen way preserves life as life; no surgical knife touches it.

Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis

Erich Fromm

[lustingupon]

[vaninnavaninni]

“You must read, you must persevere, you must sit up nights, you must inquire, and exert the utmost power of your mind. If one way does not lead to the desired meaning, take another; if obstacles arise, then still another; until, if your strength holds out, you will find that clear which at first looked dark.”

— Giovanni Boccaccio (b. 16 June 1313)