Category: landscape

“a […] cosmology that depended on their attention”

“Distraction was not just a personal problem, they knew; it was part of the warp of the world,” Kreiner (Jamie Kreiner’s new book, “The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction” (Liveright)) writes. “Attention would not have been morally necessary, would not have been the objective of their culture of conflict and control, were it not for the fact that it centered on the divine order.” (Casey Cep, Eat, Pray, Concentrate, New Yorker, January 30, 2023)

“Of heterotopias, Foucault writes, “We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.””

“In some way, any imaginary situation can be lived in advance.”

“confidence-sustaining habits” (LB)

“the perennial problem of artists: time, and what to do in it.” (ZS)

“the flowers we tend with our own hands have a habit of blooming in our expectations and filling our hopes with a sweetness”

“it is no use relying on artists, poets, philosophers, or saints to make something of the enclosed spaces or the waste portions of our soul: Il faut cultiver notre jardin.” (Vernon Lee)

“I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately,

about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.” (ESM)

“systems of renewal” (RS)

“speculative knowledge of freedom would establish the vision of what might be, even if unrealizable within the prevailing terms of order.”

“everyday practices explored the possibility of transfigured existence and cultivated an imagination of the otherwise and elsewhere”

“At secret meetings and freedom schools, hidden away in loopholes of retreat and hush arbors, gathered at the river or dwelling in the swamp, the enslaved articulated a vision of freedom that far exceeded that of the liberal imagination. It enabled them to conceive other ways of existing” (SH, Scenes of Subjection)

“split open the dreary world to expose an enchanted one”

“It was the name that called forth the true him.”

“The other selves were like the words he spoke—fabrications of the moment, misinformation required to protect Son from harm and to secure that one reality at least.”

“There were no photos of them, but they were there in the pictures of trees behind their houses, the fields where they worked, the river they fished, the church where they testified, the joints where they drank.”

“This is the place. Where you can take a choice.” (TM, Tar Baby)