To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is the world we share with others. Someone […]
One of the many surprises at the recent extraordinary exhibition, Goya: Order & Disorder, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston were his still-life paintings. They are remarkable for their departure from traditional still lifes of memento mori sentiments that usually include only a trace of the reminder of death. In Goya’s still lifes, […]
Childhood as a Modern Invention The Metropolitan Museum of Art is featuring an exhibition of Goya’s four portraits of members of the Altamira family. In walking through the exhibition’s small room last Friday, Goya’s paintings of the children and their accompanying labels reminded me of a book I read last year. In The Erosion of Childhood, Valerie Polakow examines the evolving meaning of […]
Childhood as a Modern Invention The Metropolitan Museum of Art is featuring an exhibition of Goya’s four portraits of members of the Altamira family. In walking through the exhibition’s small room last Friday, Goya’s paintings of the children and their accompanying labels reminded me of a book I read last year. In The Erosion of Childhood, Valerie Polakow examines the evolving meaning of […]
Childhood as a Modern Invention The Metropolitan Museum of Art is featuring an exhibition of Goya’s four portraits of members of the Altamira family. In walking through the exhibition’s small room last Friday, Goya’s paintings of the children and their accompanying labels reminded me of a book I read last year. In The Erosion of Childhood, Valerie Polakow examines the evolving meaning of […]
July 16, 2018
A very nice piece, William. I am reminded of a Sung Dynasty poem that D.T. Suzuki quotes in one of his books. I'm not sure of its relevance here, but it seems to resonate somehow. Misty rain on Mount Lu, And waves surging at Che Kiang. When you have not been there, Many a regret you have; But once there and homeward you wend, How matter-of-fact things look! Misty rain on Mount Lu And waves surging at Che Kiang.
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Childhood as a Modern Invention The Metropolitan Museum of Art is featuring an exhibition of Goya’s four portraits of members of the Altamira family. In walking through the exhibition’s small room last Friday, Goya’s paintings of the children and their accompanying labels reminded me of a book I read last year. In The Erosion of Childhood, Valerie Polakow examines the evolving meaning of […]
June 14, 2018
The time that takes place in stories compared to the time that we actually live is radically abbreviated. It briskly sweeps aside all the commonplace moments that make up the long stretch of toilsome time and focuses instead on the interesting and compelling. With a mere section break or a simple transitional phrase, days, months, and whole years are disposed of as if they had no significance at all. “Then time passed slowly until the day arrived when….” A lot of important living is hidden in such a phrase. From the moment-to-moment flow of time, the storyteller lifts out only those narr...
read more... join the conversation >To place a book between yourself and the people you live with is to distance yourself from the social world—and its requirement that women be pleasant and useful to other people.
“Still, if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q.” — Virginia Woolf
July 16, 2018
William Eaton
Thanks a lot, Steve. And, continuing the segue-ing, here's an old (and traditional) Gary Snyder poem I just came across yesterday: Seaman’s Ditty I’m wondering where you are now Married, or mad, or free: Wherever you are you’re likely glad, But memory troubles me. We could’ve had us children, We could’ve had a home— But you thought not, and I thought not, And these nine years we roam. Today I worked in the deep dark tanks, And climbed out to watch the sea: Gulls and salty waves pass by, And mountains of Araby. I’ve travelled the lonely oceans And wandered the...
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