Mr. Glenn Gould.
Men Improve with the Years
W. B. Yeats
I am worn out with dreams;
A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams;
And all day long I look
Upon this lady’s beauty
As though I had found in a book
A pictured beauty,
Pleased to have filled the eyes
Or the discerning ears,
Delighted to be but wise,
For men improve with the years;
And yet, and yet,
Is this my dream, or the truth?
O would that we had met
When I had my burning youth!
But I grow old among dreams,
A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams.
And Sir Thomas Browne, who was the son of a silk merchant and may well have had an eye for these things, remarks in a passage of the ‘Pseudodoxia Epidemica’ that I can no longer find that in the Holland of his time it was customary, in a home where there had been a death, to drape black mourning ribbons over all the mirrors and all canvasses depicting landscapes or people or the fruits of the field, so that the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of a land now being lost for ever.
W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
Before we leave on our trip together, Chris and I scramble to put together the artwork for the album…since we are set to leave the day after the wedding, we only have this single afternoon to finish everything, or the album will be pushed back…any attempt to this point of working with the label to get what I want artwork-wise have proven to be frustrating and disappointing…so it falls on my shoulders at the last second to get it done, and Chris is recruited in because of her art school background…taking copies of a bunch of old photos, some of strangers and some of my family, we draw and write the lyrics on them in such a way to evoke a lost photo album (like one would find in somebody’s attic)…in some corners, the words are barely legible, in others they ring loud and clear…we work diligently for around 8 hours straight to finish, with us drawing on our hands and knees on the hardwood floor of the house… although I am not satisfied with the results, they will have to do…I choose to leave the back photo of the booklet untouched, a picture of my mom as a child, sitting on the moon at Riverview…
Billy Corgan, 2005.
“Siamese dream.”
Scientists study the phases of the moon on lunar models in preparation for an eventual manned flight to moon.
(via todaystie)
Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people’s stories, insofar as these stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.
Teju Cole, Open City
(via todaystie)
