Imagine then what happens when somebody comes upon the silence of the Fayum faces and stops short. Images of men and women making no appeal whatsoever, asking for nothing, yet declaring themselves, and anybody who is looking at them, alive! They incarnate, frail as they are, a forgotten self-respect. They confirm, despite everything, that life was and is a gift.
The images convincingly represent men, trees, hills, helmets, stones. And one knows that such things grow, develop, and have a life of their own, just as one knows that the acrobat can fall. Consequently, when here their forms are made to exist in perfect correspondence, you can only feel that all that has previously occurred to them, has occurred in preparation for this presented moment. Such a painting makes the present the apex of the whole past.
I won’t make the same mistake again. I’ll make others, of course.
Throughout history, there are always new terrors – even if a few disappear, yet there are no new happinesses – happiness is always the old one.
They both want it understood that not to resist is to be indifferent, that to forget or not to know is also to be indifferent, and that to be indifferent is to condone.
But what engaged Bellini was not light which, destroying darkness, enables us to distinguish one object from another; it was, rather, the way that, when light is diffused, it creates a unity of all the objects that it falls on.
I do not want to suggest that I saw more in 1973 than in 1963. I saw differently. That is all.
The Impressionist vocabulary of images is that of a popular dream, the awaited, beloved, secular Sunday.
The sitter had not yet become a model, and the painter had not yet become a broker for future glory. Instead, the two of them, living at that moment, collaborated in a preparation for death, a preparation which would ensure survival. To paint was to name, and to be named was a guarantee of this continuity.
Their love for God was based in their satisfaction with the status quo.
Lines of force twist and elongate between people, objects, institutions, ideas. The individuals are tragically like marionettes, independently animate but bound by a web they choose not to see; they could resist if they wished, but so few of them do.
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.
But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.
The “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram — life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
We got rid of the day as well as we could.
The real issue with speed is not just how fast can you go, but where are you going so fast? It doesn’t help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place.
If you draw, the world becomes more beautiful, far more beautiful. Trees that used to be just scrub suddenly reveal their form. Animals that were ugly make you see their beauty. If you then go for a walk, you’ll be amazed how different everything can look. Less and less is ugly if every day you recognize beautiful forms in ugliness and learn to love them.
It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.”
“I no longer love blue skies,” said Rehman, who was injured by shrapnel in the attack. “In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.”
Our relationship was not abusive; it was a fight, not a battle; it was a competition for the oxygen in the room.
What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment.
Almost everyone I know is busy. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications.
And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.
While we use recipes to inspire us, we never abandon our senses. Chiefly, taste. Taste is everything.