“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
“Seas move away, why not lovers? The harbours of Ephesus, the rivers of Heraclitus disappear and are replaced by estuaries of silt. The wife of Candaules becomes the wife of Gyges. Libraries burn.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje’s words are plain wizardry about visible wars and the invisible, the ones we battle everyday with us, shadows, dust and smoke. Nobody has molded love and life in such astounding stories.
He was born on the 12th of September, 79 years ago, in Sri Lanka.
Art by Vincent van Gogh.
Welcome October!
Art – Elsa Beskow
Elsa Beskow was a well-known Swedish author and illustrator of children’s books. Some of her best-known books are Tale of the Little Little Old Woman and Aunt Green, Aunt Brown and Aunt Lavender.
“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
― Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019)
Art – Frantisek (Franz) Dvorak (Czech painter) 1862–1927
“It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what.”
― John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga
Art – Carlo Fornara
The Judgement of Paris is a story from Greek mythology, which was one of the events that led up to the Trojan War and in later versions of the story to the foundation of Rome.
Eris, the goddess of discord, was not invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. In revenge, Eris brought a golden apple, inscribed, “To the fairest one,” which she threw into the wedding. Three goddesses, Hera, Athena and Aphrodite, agreed to have Paris of Troy choose the fairest one. Paris chose Aphrodite, because she bribed him by giving him the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta, wife of Menelaus. Paris carried Helen off to Troy, and the Greeks invaded Troy for Helen’s return. This was the cause of the Trojan War. Figuratively, the phrase, “The Judgment of Paris,” can mean the ultimate origin of a war or other event.
Art – “Judgement of Paris” by Michael Cheval
“Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to penetrate without a shudder those ivory or horned gates which separate us from the invisible world.”
– Gerard De Nerval
Art by Rob Gonsalves.
“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it.
Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner
Art – Reading by Lamplight – George Clausen (1852–1944)
“Do you know that every perfect life would mean the end of art?”
– Robert Musil – author of The Man Without Qualities.
I have started my poems out of an imperfect heart. I started my business out of an imperfect life wanting to do more—for me and for others.
Every person enters your life fighting the same conundrum. Your art can touch their souls and perfect some angles. Your magic might cast some threads in the community and create a better life.
Art – John Singer Sargent
For poetry is like light, and it is light.
It shines over all, like the blue sky, with the same blue justice.
For poetry is the sunlight of consciousness:
It is also the soil of the fruits of knowledge
In the orchards of being:
It shows us the pleasures of the city.
It lights up the structures of reality.
It is a cause of knowledge and laughter:
It sharpens the whistles of the witty:
It is like morning and the flutes of morning, chanting and enchanted.
It is the birth and the rebirth of the first morning forever.
Poetry is quick as tigers, clever as cats, vivid as oranges,
Nevertheless, it is deathless: it is evergreen and in blossom; long after the Pharaohs and the Caesars have fallen,
It shines and endures more than diamonds,
It is because poetry is the actuality of possibility, it is
The reality of the imagination,
The throat of exaltation,
The processions of possessions,
The motion of meaning and
The meaning of morning and
The mastery of meaning.
― Delmore Schwartz
Art – Edward Hopper
