Miquel Barcelo

La Solitude Organisative (2008)
private collection
mixed media on canvas

Denis Diderot

Everything changes, everything passes. Only the totality remains.
Le Rêve de d’Alembert (D’Alembert’s Dream), 1769

Jonathan Freedland

• Above all, it serves as a case study for the way contemporary empire operates, exploding the myth that the United States differs from its British, Spanish, and Roman predecessors by eschewing both the brute conquest of land and the dispossession of those unfortunate enough to get in the way. [...]
• In Vine's persuasive telling, it is from the expansionist instincts of the military services, rather than the conscious decisions of civilian policymakers, that the imperialist project draws much of its energy. It is the military brass's reflexive empire-building that builds an empire. [...]
• Vine's evidence casts a fresh light on the ongoing debate over whether or not the US can be said to constitute an empire and, if so, how it might compare with its historical predecessors. It had previously been fashionable to regard the US empire as exceptional, a break from the past in that its influence is almost entirely indirect and economic, since it refuses to join the Romans or British in ruling over colonies directly. [...]
• Thanks to the work of scholars such as Chalmers Johnson and now Vine, we can see the weakness in that argument. The latter estimates that there are one thousand US military bases and installations "on the sovereign land of other nations." This "base world," as Johnson calls it, is presented benignly, as the product of voluntary, bilateral pacts between the US and those states that agree for their land to be occupied. But often this presentation is, in the idiom of that British official, a "fiction." Behind the veneer can lie the crude expropriation of land and the callous dispossession of some of the world's weakest people. That is how it used to be in the old days of empire, whether under Rome or Queen Victoria. And that's how it was in the Chagos Islands not much more than a generation ago. [...]
  

The New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 9 · May 28, 2009
'A Black and Disgraceful Site', by Jonathan Freedland
A review of David Vine's 'Island of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia' (2009)

Milan Kundera

The everyday. It is not merely ennui, pointlessness, repetition, triviality; it is beauty as well; for instance, the magical charm of atmospheres, a thing everyone has felt in his own life: a strain of music heard faintly from the next apartment; the wind rattling the windowpane; the monotonous voice of a professor that a lovesick schoolgirl hears without registering; these trivial circumstances stamp some personal event with an inimitable singularity that dates it and makes it unforgettable.
The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts (2005), "The Consciousness of Continuity"

V. S. Naipaul

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
A Bend in the River (1979)

Chad Gifford

Teach me things.
What kind of things?
The things you know.

Gabriel García Márquez

Let no one be deceived, no, thinking that what he awaits will last longer than what he has seen.
Memories of My Melancholy Whore (2006)

Robert Burns

To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest, with The Plough (1785)
by Robert Burns

Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

I'm truly sorry man's dominion,
Has broken nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't!

Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell-
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld!

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men
Gang aft agley,
An'lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

The Martyrdom of Saint Peter (1600-1601)
Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, Italy
oil on canvas

Frederic Edwin Church

Cayambe (1858)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
oil on canvas

TBD

rise above...
It doesn’t matter if you like it. It matters if it is good...

Esther Hicks

Lighten up.
Laugh more.
Appreciate more.
All is well.

Ron Mueck

Mask II (2001-2)
private collection
mixed media

Samuel Beckett

Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.
'From an Abandoned Work', Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 (ed. S. E. Gontarski), p. 160.

David Foster Wallace

If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
From the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address (May 21, 2005) -- Thanks, Em.

Malcolm Gladwell

But what did [Hunter College Elementary School] achieve with that best-students model? In the nineteen-eighties, a handful of educational researchers surveyed the students who attended the elementary school between 1948 and 1960… This was a group with an average I.Q. of 157—three and a half standard deviations above the mean—who had been given what, by any measure, was one of the finest classroom experiences in the world. As graduates, though, they weren’t nearly as distinguished as they were expected to be. “Although most of our study participants are successful and fairly content with their lives and accomplishments,” the authors conclude, “there are no superstars . . . and only one or two familiar names.” The researchers spend a great deal of time trying to figure out why Hunter graduates are so disappointing, and end up sounding very much like Wilbur Bender [Harvard's admissions dean from 1952 to 1960]. Being a smart child isn’t a terribly good predictor of success in later life, they conclude. “Non-intellective” factors—like motivation and social skills—probably matter more. Perhaps, the study suggests, “after noting the sacrifices involved in trying for national or world-class leadership in a field, H.C.E.S. graduates decided that the intelligent thing to do was to choose relatively happy and successful lives.” It is a wonderful thing, of course, for a school to turn out lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. But Harvard didn’t want lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. It wanted superstars, and Bender and his colleagues recognized that if this is your goal a best-students model isn’t enough.
'Getting In: The social logic of Ivy League admissions', The New Yorker (October 10, 2005).
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/10/051010crat_atlarge

David Foster Wallace

Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
From ‘The Pale King’ (forthcoming)

David Foster Wallace

Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?
Interview with Larry McCaffery (1991)

David Foster Wallace

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
From ‘Good Old Neon’ (2001)

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599-1600)
San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome, Italy
oil on canvas

Hendrick van Vliet

Interior of the Oude Kerk, Delft (1660)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
oil on canvas

Atheist Bus Campaign

There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist_Bus_Campaign

Francis Bacon

Study for Chimpanzee (1957)
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
oil and pastel on canvas

Ron Padgett

The Stapler
by Ron Padgett

When my mother died
she left very little: old clothes,
modest furniture, dishes, some
change, and that was about it.
Except for the stapler. I found it
in a drawer stuffed with old bills
and bank statements. Right off
I noticed how easily it penetrated
stacks of paper, leaving no bruise
on the heel of my hand.
It worked so well I brought it home,
along with a box of staples, from
which only a few of the original 5000
were missing. The trick is remembering
how to load it—it takes me several minutes
to figure it out each time, but I persist until
Oh yes, that's it! Somewhere in all this
my mother is spread out and floating
like a mist so fine it can't be seen,
an idea of wafting, the opposite of stapler.

Appears in The New York Review of Books, December 18, 2008 (Volume 55, Number 20).

constult / latibulate / yepsen

constult
to act stupidly together.
latibulate
to hide oneself in a corner.
yepsen
the amount that can be held in two hands cupped together; also, the two cupped hands themselves.