Category: landscape

Some people say the devil is beating
his wife. Some people say the devil
is pawing his wife. Some people say
the devil is doubling down on an overall
attitude of entitlement toward
the body of his wife. Some people
say the devil won’t need to be sorry,
as the devil believes that nothing
comes after this life. Some people say
that in spite of the devil’s public,
long-standing, and meticulously
logged disdain for the health
and wholeness of his wife, the devil
spends all day, every day, insisting
grandly and gleefully on his general
pro-woman ethos, that the devil truly
considers himself to be an unswayed
crusader: effortlessly magnetic,
scrupulous, gracious, and, in spite of
the devil’s several advanced degrees,
a luminous autodidact. Some people
say calm down; this is commonplace.
Some people say calm down;
this is very rare. Some people say
the sun is washing her face. Some
people say in Hell, they’re having a fair.

Sunshower, Natalie Shapero

My failure to evolve has been causing me a lot of grief lately.I can't walk on my knuckles through the acres of shattered glass in the streets.I get lost in the arcades. My feet stink at the soirees.The hills have been bulldozed from whence cameth my help.The halfway houses where I met my kind dreaming of flickering lights in the woods are shuttered I don't know why. "Try," say the good people who bring me my food,"to make your secret anguish your secret weapon. Otherwise, your immortality will bean exhibit in a vitrine at the local museum, a picture in a book."But I can't get the hang of it. The heavy instructions fall from my hands.It takes so long for the human to become a human!He affrights civilizations with his cry. At his approach,the mountains retreat. A great wind crashes the garden party.Manipulate singly neither his consummation nor his despairbut the two together like curettesand peel back the pitch-black integuments to discover the penciled-in figure on the painted-over mural of time, sitting on the sketch of a boulder belowhis aching sunrise, his moody, disappointed sunset.

Vijay Seshadri, The Descent of Man

A Lighthouse for Dark Times, Maria Popova (The Marginalian)

“Cultures and civilizations tend to overestimate the stability of their states, only to find themselves regularly discomposed by internal pressures and tensions too great for the system to hold. And yet always in them there are those who harness from the chaos the creative force to imagine, and in the act of imagining to effect, a phase transition to a different state.

We call those people artists — they who never forget it is only what we can imagine that limits or liberates what is possible.

[…][Hermann] Hesse observes that artists feel these painful instabilities more deeply than the rest of society and more restlessly, and out of that restlessness they make the lifelines that save us, the lifelines we call art. […]

Hesse insists that artists nourish the goodness of the human spirit “with such strength and indescribable beauty” that it is “flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment.”