window
"The Window", 1924 - Marc Chagall, Russian/French, 1887 - 1895
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“The strange operation of memory is also associated with windows as mediating objects. They are surfaces that are removed from the original or genuine but that reflect their image, capture a still-life of the ‘real,’ and can go on reflecting it forever. The reflection, the mimetic image of what was, is itself the substance of the memory. [Amos] Oz writes, for example: "Memory deludes me. I have just remembered something that I completely forgot after it happened. I remembered it again when I was about sixteen, and then I forgot it again. And this morning I remembered not the event itself but the previous recollection, which itself was more than forty years ago, as though an old moon was reflected in a windowpane from which it was reflected in a lake, from where memory draws, not the reflection itself, which no longer exists, but only its whitened bones." Memory is a series of windows that look through windows that are reflected in windows. The impression, the reflection, the collection of light caught in the shield, becomes the thing itself.” Natasha Wheatley, from “it is the hunter and you are the harpooned dolphin: Memory, Writing, and Medusa–Amos Oz and his Women,” The Jewish Quarterly Review (vol. 100, no. 4, Fall 2010)
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