Music is the space between the notes

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
 

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Image: David Hurn, Cactus nursery, Arizona
Title: Claude Debussy

Abeille, Arbre, Bois, Jardin

"And though recently all his living with books had put his head rather in the clouds and made him less and less interested in the world around him, now on the other hand reading the Encyclopedia, and beautiful words like Abeille, Arbre, Bois, Jardin, made him rediscover everything around him as if seeing it for the first time."

-Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

Image: Isaac Eddy and James Wilson, history from 4000 BC - 1813 AD

Foreignness

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Image: Georgiana Kelly, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Calvino on Classics

"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."
— Italo Calvino

Image: Alejandra Laviada, Before the Fall