Human Under Construction

2011-09-04

“Sit down, my dear,” said Mr. Jarndyce. “This, you must know, is the growlery. When I am out of humour, I come and growl here.”

“You must be here very seldom, sir,” said I.

“Oh, you don’t know me!” he returned. “When I am deceived or disappointed in—the wind, and it’s easterly, I take refuge here. The growlery is the best-used room in the house….”

Bleak House, by Charles Dickens

Aging women mourn while they go to market,
buy fish, figs, tomatoes, enough “today” to
feed the wolf asleep under the table
who wakes from what dream?
What but loss comes round with the changing season?

Marilyn Hacker, “A Braid of Garlic”

Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson thought this picture of a rather sultry Alice disguised as a street urchin — hand-tinted by Carroll himself — the most beautiful photograph he had ever seen.

Tom Gauld

"Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire." — Franz Kafka to Milena Jesenska, 1921

Manuel Braun

2011-09-03

Bamboo forest
moriyu

Broken Statuette
Cold Spring, New York, 1982
From Arthur Tress: Fantastic Voyage, Photographs 1956-2000

US Army Flight Medic Brandon Lowther (left) holds the hand of a fatally wounded US army soldier as he is airlifted by the Medevac helicopter of 159th Brigade Task Force Thunder, on August 24, 2011, to Kandahar Hospital Role 3. Two US soldiers were heavily injured by gun shots and brought to the hospital. (Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images)

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2Ictk9/www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/08/afghanistan-august-2011/100139/

Leo Tolstoy Barefoot, 1901
Il’ya Repin (Russian, b. Ukraine, 1844-1930)

2011-08-16

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."

— The Painted Drum, Louise Erdrich