[Image: “Prague – Diving Pig,” by a photographer identifying him/herself only as “BR0WSER.” Found it at Flickr, of course, and use it here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). Depending on your mindset at the moment, the picture can be amusing or disorienting; it helps to read the caption, which identifies this as a sculpture by one Jan Kedlec. For a bit more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]
From whiskey river:
The sky was clear that morning and there might still have been stars although he saw none. The thought of stars contributed to the power of his feeling. What moved him was a sense of those worlds around us, our knowledge however imperfect of their nature, our sense of their possessing some grain of our past and of our lives to come. It was that most powerful sense of our being alive on the planet. It was that most powerful sense of how singular, in the vastness of creation, is the richness of our opportunity. The sense of that hour was of an exquisite privilege, the great benefice of living here and renewing ourselves with love. What a paradise it seemed!
(John Cheever [source])
…and:
But is this really what having a self feels like? Do selves always seek their good, in the end? Are they never perverse? Do they always want meaning? Do they not sometimes want its opposite? And is this how memory works? Do our childhoods often return to us in the form of coherent, lyrical reveries? Is this how time feels? Do the things of the world really come to us like this, embroidered in the verbal fancy of times past? Is this really realism?
(Zadie Smith [source])
…and:
An Archival Print
God snaps your picture — don’t look away —
this room right now, your face tilted
exactly as it is before you can think
or control it. Go ahead, let it betray
all the secret emergencies and still hold
that partial disguise you call your character.Even your lip, they say, the way it curves
or doesn’t, or can’t decide, will deliver
bales of evidence. The camera, wide open,
stands ready; the exposure is thirty-five years
or so — after that you have become
whatever the veneer is, all the way through.Now you want to explain. Your mother
was a certain — how to express it? — influence.
Yes. And your father, whatever he was,
you couldn’t change that. No. And your town
of course had its limits. Go on, keep talking —
Hold it. Don’t move. That’s you forever.
(William Stafford [source])
