Paradise Unearthed

A museum of musings, thoughts, and interests by Joanne K.

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quote from the last living frank lloyd wright client, roland reisley, who is 101 and has lived in his flw house for 73 years

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@johnmurrayjnr

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instagram

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“We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

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“I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don’t really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man.”

— Albert Camus, The Plague (tr. Stuart Gilbert)

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Firenze

1955-60

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“It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living pleasantly.”

— Epicurus, Principal Doctrines (via philosophybits)

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"All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name."

- André Breton, L'amour fou

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Tamamura Kozaburo.  Fuji from Hakone Lake, number 861, 1880-1923.

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Mahmoud Darwish, Visible Music

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“Languages are not algorithms of one another, you cannot match them item for item,” she says, adding “what if [there is] a word that does not intend to be translatable.” She calls this “a word that stops itself,” and writes: “in the presence of a word that stops itself, in that silence, one has the feeling that something has passed us and kept going, that some possibility has got free.” There it is again, that indescribable nearness, the sense of proximity to something words can’t identify.

— In which she is Anne Carson, as written here.

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I am sitting contented and alone in a little park near the Palazzo Scaligere in Verona, glimpsing the mists of early autumn as they shift and fade among the pines and city battlements on the hills above the river Adige.

The river has recovered from this morning’s rainfall. It is now restoring to its shapely body its own secret light, a color of faintly cloudy green and pearl. Directly in front of my bench, perhaps thirty yards away from me, there is a startling woman. Her hair is black as the inmost secret of light in a perfectly cut diamond, a perilous black, a secret light that must have been studied for many years before the anxious and disciplined craftsman could achieve the necessary balance between courage and skill to stroke the strange stone and take the one chance he would ever have to bring that secret to light.

While I was trying to compose the preceding sentence, the woman rose from her park bench and walked away. I am afraid her secret might never come to light in
my lifetime. But my lifetime is not the only one. I will never see her again. I hope she brings some other man’s secret face to light, as somebody brought mine. I am startled to discover that I am not afraid. I am free to give a blessing out of my silence into that woman’s black hair. I trust her to go on living. I believe in her black hair, her diamond that is still asleep. I would close my eyes to daydream about her. But those silent companions who watch over me from the insides of my eyelids are too brilliant for me to meet face to face.

The very emptiness of the park bench in front of mine is what makes me happy. Somewhere else in Verona at just this moment, a woman is sitting or walking or standing still upright. Surely two careful and accurate hands, total strangers to me, measure the invisible idea of the secret vein in her hair. They are waiting patiently until they know what they alone can ever know: that time when her life will pause in mid-flight for a split second. The hands will touch her black hair very gently. A wind off the river Adige will flutter past her. She will turn around, smile a welcome, and place a flawless and fully formed Italian daybreak into the hands.

I don’t have any idea what his face will look like. The light still hidden inside his body is no business of mine. I am happy enough to sit in this park alone now. I turn my own face toward the river Adige. A little wind flutters off the water and brushes past me and returns.

It is all right with me to know that my life is only one life. I feel like the light of the river Adige.

By this time, we are both an open secret.

James Wright, “The Secret of Light,” American Poet (vol. 36, Spring 200)

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— John Berger, Portraits (XIV: Caravaggio)

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“While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning how to play a new tune on the flute. “What will be the use of that?” he was asked. “To know this tune before dying.””

— Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered (tr. Richard Howard) Socrate, la veille de sa mort, était en train d’apprendre un air de flûte. «A quoi cela te servira-t-il? lui dit-on. — A savoir cet air avant de mourir.» (via vfollia)

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Aman Tokyo, October 2024

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Mimosa Tree, Poppies, and Other Summer Flowers by Tawaraya Sōsetsu

Japanese, Edo Period, 1630-1670

ink, color, and gold on paper

Freer Gallery of Art

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The Guild of Saint Luke