Category Archives: Art

Goodbye to All That

My heart aches to be there with him. ———GOODBYE TO ALL THAT by Joan Didion——— (1967) How many miles to Babylon? Three score miles and ten— Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again— If your feet are … Continue reading

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Inspiration/Life: The Wind that Blows Through Us

Interviewer: How old were you when you became a mother? Marie Howe (poet): A hundred. Like those ladies in the Bible. I was a  hundred years old. I was Sarah. I was Abraham’s Sarah. I was just telling my students … Continue reading

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To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings. … Continue reading

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En Bateau (detail) Caspar David Friedrich, 1814

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Heaven Below

1544. (Emily Dickinson) Who has not found the Heaven – below – Will fail of it above – For Angels rent the House next ours, Wherever we remove –

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The Heart of the Fields: The Mythology of Forster’s English Landscape

The Heart of the Fields The Mythology of Forster’s English Landscape In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster writes of Meredith, “What is really tragic and enduring in the scenery of England was hidden from him, and so is what … Continue reading

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Landscape with St. Jerome, 1516. Detail.

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Shakespeare on Life

“And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it.” ― William Shakespeare, As You Like It (Happy birthday, old man)

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How art changes us

I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what’s inside the box bears some linear resemblance … Continue reading

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The Androgyny of Creativity

Woolf believed that the creative mind is androgynous. She was an expert in Elizabethan literature. She loved both the scope and the certainty of the Renaissance mind. Shakespeare, writing his sonnets to boys and women with equal passion, understanding the … Continue reading

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