[Image: “Manhattan Cocktail,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) This was #682 (2019-08-09) in my series of one thousand “#everydaybandw” posts on Instagram. As you can see, they weren’t always 100% “B&W”; I told myself I was honoring the spirit of the label rather than the letter. (Or maybe I was just making vague, hand-waving excuses of the sorta-kinda-close-enough variety.)]

From whiskey river:

“Monster” is derived from the Latin noun monstrum, “divine portent,” itself formed on the root of the verb monere, “to warn.” It came to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous creatures like the sphinx who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts, because the ancients considered the appearance of such beings to be a sign of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, “Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening.”

(Susan Stryker [source])

…and:

When you observe that today’s controversies often reveal not relevance but the clash of the untaught with the wrongly taught, and when you can endure this knowledge without cynicism, as a lover of humankind, greater compensations will be open to you than a sense of your own importance or satisfaction in thinking about the unreliability of others.

(Idries Shah [source])

…and:

Is there
any way we can purely touch the world again, the way
a salamander does, breathing through its skin? Can we
become the strands of this shrine we weave ourselves into
hoping to emerge into a world where — where what?
There is no end to desire, which means no end to regret,
no end to our need for an ending, so that even the sky refuses
our touch, that sky which, at its bluest, is the most empty.

(Richard Jackson [source, apparently (unconfirmed); the last several lines of a poem called “Benediction”])

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