In full view of the world, the crown of the tree unfolds and spreads in time and space

Like a blazing comet, I’ve traversed infinite nights, interstellar spaces of the imagination, voluptuousness and fear. I’ve been a man, a woman, an old person, a little girl, I’ve been the crowds on the grand boulevards of the capital cities of the West, I’ve been the serene Buddha of the East, whose calm and wisdom we envy. I’ve known honor and dishonor, enthusiasm and exhaustion….I’ve been the sun and the moon, and everything because life is not enough.

-Antonio Tabucchi, Dreams of Dreams and the Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa
Image: Jane Hammond. 2004.
Title: Paul Klee

A swarm of voluptuous moths

    Amazingly,
I am too the memory of a sword
and of a solitary, falling sun,
turning itself to gold, then gray, then nothing.
I am the one who sees the approaching ships
from harbor. And I am the dwindled books,
the rare engravings worn away by time;
the one who envies those already dead.
Stranger to be the woman who interlaces
such words as these, in some room in a house.

-adapted from Jorge Luis Borges, “I” 

Image: Christo and Jeanne Claude, Wrapped Trees, Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park, Riehen, Switzerland, 1997-98
Photo: Wolfgang Volz
Title: Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book], translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

A Grotesque and Magnificent Inferno

Estimated number of fireflies it would take to generate the visible brightness of the sun: 14,286,000,000.

-Professor Cole Gilbert, Cornell University

Title: Alexander Blok
Image: Robert Rausschenberg, Mother of God, 1950 

Rather Than Words

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

—Philip Larkin, “High Windows”

Image: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, The arrival of the Queen of the Night, production for Mozart’s Magic Flute, 1815