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Santiago Rusiñol: A Garden in Aranjuez (oil on canvas: 1907)

Illustration of the relationship between the human face and a Tuscan column capital, from Jacques François Blondel’s Cours d’architecture, Vol 1 (c. 1771) Paris: Desaint

#architecture #drawing

"To my mind, conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.

You need both, because some of what is good about our world is irreplaceable and has to be guarded, while some of what is bad is unacceptable and has to be changed. We should never forget that the people who oppose our various endeavors and argue for another way are well intentioned too, even when they’re wrong, and that they’re not always wrong.

But we can also never forget what moves us to gratitude, and so what we stand for and defend: the extraordinary cultural inheritance we have; the amazing country built for us by others and defended by our best and bravest; America’s unmatched potential for lifting the poor and the weak; the legacy of freedom—of ordered liberty—built up over centuries of hard work.

We value these things not because they are triumphant and invincible but because they are precious and vulnerable, because they weren’t fated to happen, and they’re not certain to survive. They need us—and our gratitude for them should move us to defend them and to build on them."

—National Affairs editor Yuval Levin's remarks on winning the Bradley Prize, June 12, 2013

Shasta Daisies: Nashville, summer 2016

“Of all people, only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only those are really alive. For they not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes, but they annex every age to theirs. All the years that have passed before them are added to their own. Unless we are very ungrateful, all those distinguished founders of holy creeds were born for us and prepared for us a way of life. By the toil of others we are led into the presence of things which have been brought from darkness into light. We are excluded from no age, but we have access to them all […].”

– Seneca (b. 4 B.C., Córdoba, Spain; d. 65 A.D., Rome) On the Shortness of Life

'Often we find purely functional objects beautiful; but usually we do so when their function has been lost. People collect old tools and put them up on their walls. These are things which were made purely for a function, and were never regarded as being beautiful by the people who made them. Nevertheless, they strike us as beautiful because there is, as it were, the memory of a function in them, and that memory is translated into aesthetic values. It is as though the ghost of people past were still present in the object. And that is very characteristic of the aesthetic attitude generally. We see, as it were, haunting things the people who can no longer use them. So functional objects often acquire a beauty by losing their function.'

—Roger Scruton: ‘Architecture and Aesthetic Education’ lecture, St John's College

“In The End of the Affair, Graham Greene focuses on the traumatic impact which a miracle has on a non-believer. But I think Graham Greene is too naive here. […] I think the greatest shock for a religious person is to discover that it really works. And it's the same with psychoanalysts. Many of my psychoanalytical friends are by nature skeptical, and from time to time they are shocked and say to me, 'My God!—it really works, this interpretation!' [...]

The truly traumatic thing is not not to believe, but to believe seriously too much.”

— Slavoj Zizek (from ‘debate’ with Cornel West, 2005)

‘Jesus stepped forward and touched the coffin [...] and he said, “Young man, I tell you, arise!” The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized them all [...]’

— Luke 7

Trailer for the forthcoming film, Loving Vincent, by Breakthu films.

According to the film’s website, the film “will be the world’s first feature-length painted animation”, with a plot “drawn from the 800 letters written by the painter himself”. Every frame in the film “is an oil painting on canvas, using the very same technique in which Vincent himself painted.”

#Vincent van Gogh #Loving Vincent #animation #painting

German chamomile, ‘Walker’s Low’ catmint.

Nashville: Mother’s Day, 2016

“Early in June, Jacob Kahn flew to London and was away for five days. He and the artist whose retrospective he had gone to see had been close friends for five decades. He told me when he returned that the artist had barely managed to escape from Prague in the late thirties after discovering that his name was on a Gestapo list for arrest and execution without trial. His art was considered degenerate.

'Art is a danger to some people,' he said. 'Picasso used to say art is subversive.'

Did he enjoy the retrospective? I asked.

'I did not go to enjoy it. His art is not enjoyable. He is not Matisse. But he is a great artist and the retrospective did him full justice.'

Had the artist been happy? I asked.

No, the artist had not been happy. He had been tormented over what to do next. What kind of silly question had I asked? Had I ever known of a great artist who was happy?

'Rubens,' I said.

He stared gloomily out the tall windows of the studio. Perhaps, he said. Anything was possible with the Baroque.”

— Chaim Potok: My Name is Asher Lev

#Potok #Chaim Potok #Baroque

Nashville, TN: January 22, 2016

#Nashville #snow

"Philosophy is by its nature the work of the solitary individual, who ponders as an individual on truth. A thought, what has been thought out, is something that at any rate seems to belong to me myself, since it comes from me, although no one's thinking is self-supporting; consciously or unconsciously it is intertwined with many other strands. The place where a thought is perfected is the interior of the mind; thus at first it remains confined to me and has an individualistic structure. It only becomes communicable later, when it is put into words, which usually make it only approximately comprehensible to others. In contrast to this the primary factor for belief is, as we have seen, the proclaimed word. While a thought is interior, purely intellectual, the word represents the element that unites us with others. It is the way in which the intellectual communication takes place, the form in which the mind is, as it were, human, that is, corporeal and social. This primacy of the word means that faith is focused on community of mind in a quite different way from philosophical thinking. In philosophy, what comes first is the private search for truth, which then, secondarily, seeks and finds traveling companions. Faith, on the other hand, is first of all a call to community, to unity of mind through the unity of the word. Indeed, its significance is, a priori, an essentially social one: it aims at establishing unity of mind through the unity of the word. Only secondarily will it then open the way for each individual's private venture in search for truth."

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger: Introduction to Christianity (Ignatius Press: 1990/2004 edition) pp 92-93.

Painting: Fra Angelico, ‘Annunciation’ (San Marco Convent, c. 1437-46)

burnedshoes

» more of Magnum Photos « | » more pictures of World War II (and the consequences) «

'Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly create technological novelties, but equally to surrender to those novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.'

— Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

A group of Estonian students has built a large-scale installation for the purpose of amplifying the sounds of the forest. According to the article below, “The installation can also be used as a sitting and resting area or even as a stage.”

http://www.boredpanda.com/estonian-students-build-amazing-unplugged-walk-in-megaphones-in-the-middle-of-nowhere/

Photographs: Tõnu Tunnel

‘We regard everything as socially constructed—even ourselves. Well okay then, let's do what we want! Let's let our desires go where we wish. This is called freedom. This is liberty. This is individualism. And people like it. But when you try to tell people, 'Look, the costs of unleashing desire in any direction it wishes to go are devastating, especially for working class, poor, underclass human beings; if you make no-fault divorce happen so easily, this will be devastating to human beings,', then [you'll simply hear the counter-argument], 'But wait, we can't let people go unfulfilled in their lives!' And if you try to exert a moral judgement upon them, you have committed the main crime in contemporary society of moral judgement.

Our country has spent a month lionizing a 65-year-old man who says he is a 31-year-old glamour goddess. It's not just that we're saying, well okay, Bruce Jenner, we've always had eccentrics, we've always had strange characters, whatever. No, I just read a column in the WSJ a few days ago by their sports writer presenting "Caitlin" Jenner as an extraordinary profile in courage. We're supposed to celebrate, we're supposed to revere and honor these people. Instead of properly looking at them as damaged souls, as tortured human beings, we're doing something else: we're building what Rusty Reno calls "the Empire of Desire”.’

— Mark Bauerlein—author, English professor at Emory University, and senior editor at First Things—on the Liberty Law Talk podcast: Monday August 3, 2015. "What is the American State of Mind? A Conversation with Mark Bauerlein"

'The most authoritative episode of the US for 190 years was the Founding, and the extension of the founding principles through Lincoln and the Civil War. This was our default position. We would understand public policy, when we really got down to it, as [being about the question], "Does it abide by founding principles, the great patriots, the founding fathers, and Lincoln?"

Today this is not our natural recourse, at least in elite zone. Our natural recourse now is The Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King. This is where we go when we want to give a moral authority about something […] When Arne Duncan comes out and announces the Education Department findings that African-American kids are punished disproportionately for some of the same behaviors, he doesn't go back to the Founding and the importance of natural rights for everyone—no, he goes back to the Civil Rights movement. President Obama believes that the most important thing about the origins of the United States is, "our original sin of slavery." That's what matters.'

— Mark Bauerlein—author, English professor at Emory University, and senior editor at First Things—on the Liberty Law Talk podcast: Monday August 3, 2015. "What is the American State of Mind? A Conversation with Mark Bauerlein"

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