A word is a tentative form of control, grammar an enactment of how things stand. But nothing is stable, so words can lift and have resonance, can move out, take in essences as a sponge soaks in water. Thus language is rooted in simple description, and then it blooms or withers; it is suggestive, has some flourishes, or a tone and texture that have odd delights, but it has all sorts of limits and failures. If words are a cry for help, the calm space around them offers a resigned helplessness.
Colm Tóibín, "The Hard-Won Truth of the North." The New York Review of Books 9 July 2015: 42-44.
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Leiter's color photography offers its own version of chance: an attainment to the visual masterpieces that can be found in almost every urban instant. The endless, accidental rearrangement of these images belongs not to the world we understand or think about, but the world we perceive. They are fleeting, ephemeral, either missed or, just as likely, forgotten. Of all the types of memory we possess, sensory memory is the briefest. A flash of sunlight, the blinking of a traffic signal, a passing train, a tree glimpsed among thousands of trees—most sensory experiences disappear without a trace, present time spooling mercifully away. Leiter rediscovers for us this unspooling world. He shows us what we are unable to retain, if we ever fully saw it at all.
Michael Greenberg, "Catching Hold of the Devious City." The New York Review of Books 9 July 2015: 10-14.
