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2.20.2013

girl in the window




Roman Vishniac

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window

Night from a railroad car window
Is a great, dark, soft thing
Broken across with slashes of light.

Carl Sandburg

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2.17.2013

open the window and be lost

The shadows of evening fall thick and deep, and the darkness of love envelops the body and the mind.
Open the window to the west, and be lost in the sky of love;
Drink the sweet honey that steeps the petals of the lotus of the heart.
Receive the waves in your body: what splendour is in the region of the sea!
Hark! the sounds of conches and bells are rising.
Kabir says: "O brother, behold! the Lord is in this vessel of my body."


from  Songs of Kabir (tr. Rabindranath Tagore)

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2.12.2013

adventures in immediate unreality

My own life, the life of the one in flesh and blood beyond the window, appeared to me suddenly indifferent and insignificant as the travels through unknown cities of the me in the photograph appeared absurd to the live persons on the other side of the glass.

In the same way in which the photograph of me went from place to place contemplating ever new perspectives through dirty and dusty windowpanes, I too from beyond the glass led my unchanging character here and there, forever looking at new things and forever not understanding anything about them. The fact that I moved, that I was alive, could only be by chance, a chance that had no meaning, because just as I existed on this side of the window, I could exist on the other side, with the same pale face, the same eyes, the same dull hair, that converged in the mirror as a bizarre and quick figure beyond understanding.


Max Blecher
tr. Jeanie Han

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2.11.2013

the voice of the beauty of the world

Then indeed peace had come. Messages of peace breathed from the sea to the shore. Never to break its sleep any more, to lull it rather more deeply to rest, and whatever the dreamers dreamt holily, dreamt wisely, to confirm—what else was it murmuring—as Lily Briscoe laid her head on the pillow in the clean still room and heard the sea. Through the open window the voice of the beauty of the world came murmuring, too softly to hear exactly what it said—but what mattered if the meaning were plain? entreating the sleepers (the house was full again; Mrs Beckwith was staying there, also Mr Carmichael), if they would not actually come down to the beach itself at least to lift the blind and look out.





To the Lighthouse, V. Woolf 


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