– finishing up (tidying by reading, part 1) Moving my library, I became aware of quite a few half-read books laying around. I have started sorting them out — some are too bad, vexatious or tedious to be read, but most of them had just been misplaced or forgotten in the middle of things… And…
An individual human existence should be like a river —
— advice for days to come: The best way to overcome the fear of death—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should…
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” ~ Borges
Almost there A perfect Christmas gift – from my son & daughter-in-law For the next couple of days my plan is simply this: to sit quite still, here, in front of the fireplace, with all my old & new books around me, letting this wonderful space be my heaven on earth –
Apropos moving –
Lucia Berlin called many different places home during her lifetime. The following is a list she made in the late eighties detailing the pitfalls of some of them. Excerpted from Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs and Letters, by Lucia Berlin, 2018. Juneau, Alaska—Avalanche the day I was born, wiped out a third of town. Deer…
Preparations
Making a new home for my books —
A big move
Boxing up my library
Oh, no!
I’m moving … it will be fine — but right now everything is a mess! I am so much looking forward to days of quiet solitude, days when I know where to find what I’m looking for – .
Beauty beckons
Artists hate the word beauty, especially German artists. If you wanted to be really hated in Germany, then you would say, “My work is beautiful.” German artists believe in ugliness and nastiness. I think beauty can be something extremely important in our lives. And it’s not true that this is naive. This is what is…
“I never really separated painting and literature.”
Claire Daigle writes: In 1959 Twombly executed some of the most spare works of his career, among them the 24 drawings that comprise Poems to the Sea, done on the coast of Italy. What order of poems, punctuated with numerals and question marks, are these? The sea is reduced to horizon line and word, scribblings and…
Trespassing time and place
Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) is a great painter, but sometimes it seems even more accurate to describe him as a great writer. He writes of many things: his love of other great painting and writing (and sculpture and architecture), his love of nature and history and of the places where all these things intersect most…
