Something Quite Surreal

When a local Maine library was destroyed in a fire, artist Elizabeth Awalt drove over and saw something quite surreal: Hundreds of scorched pages flying around. Only the edges were burned resembling pieces of toast or even tombstones but the center of the pages were intact. She started picking up the pages, from Jean de Brunoff’s Babar, Edward Gorey, and more. She was deeply moved by these pages and remarked on how much a part of her own life these books had been. Elizabeth thought she might paint on some of them or give some to other Maine artists to paint. These pages turned into a benefit auction of works from the pages she’d recovered that day.

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

The Path

"The path to my fixed purpose is hid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run." 

-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Image: 美撒guo

Ruminations on Home

"Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there."
-Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project 

Image: Tethering and training equipment used in falconry, H Schlegel and AH Verster de Wulverhorst, from Traité de Fauconnerie  

The Sadness of Geography

"Do you understand the sadness of geography?"

—Michael Ondaatje

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Lands, a List (Mythological and Otherwise)

• Avalon
• Buyan, an island with the ability to appear and disappear in Russian mythology
• Shambhala
• Shangri-La, a fictitious valley in Tibet the idea of which may have been inspired by the myth of Shambhala
• Quivira and Cíbola, also known as the Seven Cities of Gold. These were suspected somewhere in America by the conquistadors.
• El Dorado, mythic city of gold.
• Atlantis
• Lemuria (continent)
• Mu (lost continent)
• Ys; a mythical city built on the coast of Brittany, and later swallowed by the ocean. Most versions of the legend place the city in the Douarnenez Bay.
• Cantre’r Gwaelod is the legendary ancient sunken realm said to have occupied a tract of fertile land lying between Ramsey Island and Bardsey Island in what is now Cardigan Bay to the west of Wales.

Image: La Sphere du Monde, 1549, by Oronce Fine