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Evelyn de Morgan: Portraits of Alice Mildred and Winifred Julia Spencer Stanhope, 1884.
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Salvador Dalí: Rosa papillonacea (Butterfly Rose), 1968.
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Unknown artist: Heart-and-Hand Love Token, ca. 1840-1860. American Folk Art Museum.
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Endpapers for the Faber edition of Klara and the Sun, the new Kazuo Ishiguro novel.
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Guda Koster: Houseman, 2016.
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'I love you,' Daniel told his mother, 'but with your inundation of fake news, you have created a reality for yourself that doesn’t exist, and by doing so, you are actively distancing yourself from your family. It is making it harder for us to connect with you because, unfortunately, we feel that you are just not living in the world that we live in, and it’s frightening for us.'
His mom’s response laid bare the degree to which QAnon had warped her worldview: 'Oh, honey,' she said. 'That’s how I feel about you.'
Jesselyn Cook, "'I Miss My Mom': Children of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying to Deradicalize Their Own Parents." HuffPost, 2/11/2021.
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Originally home meant the center of the world—not in a geographical, but in an ontological sense. Mircea Eliade has demonstrated how the home was the place from which the world could be founded. A home was established, as he says, "at the heart of the real." In traditional societies, everything that made sense of the world was real; the surrounding chaos existed and was threatening, but it was threatening because it was unreal. Without a home at the center of the real, one was not only shelterless but also lost in nonbeing, in unreality. Without a home everything was fragmentation.
John Berger, "The Meaning of Home."
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Robert, in coat and tie, took to the podium. In recent years, he explained, he and Suzanne had turned their attention to the prophetic visions that a number of experiencers have undergone during, and sometimes after, their NDEs [near-death experiences]. While the visions themselves were invariably apocalyptic, the Mayses spoke of them with an almost clinical detachment. Their work encompassed several methodologies: “an extensive literature review of prior research,” surveys they had sent to twenty-two subjects, and analyses of fifteen accounts by “published NDE authors.” From this material, they had identified five categories of NDE-related prophetic visions, including “current political conflict and civil strife in the United States”; “economic and social chaos caused by widespread power failures”; “severe tsunamis, earthquakes and natural disasters.” My favorite was the fourth category, described as “reset of the Earth, millions to billions of people die: supervolcano, asteroid hit, or nuclear war.” (The fifth was “post-reset world.”) It seemed appropriate that the first interesting PowerPoint I had ever seen would augur the end of civilization.
Emily Harnett, "Back from the Afterlife." The Baffler, January 2021.
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Being nice ... is not a naïve denial of the darkness of life. It’s a cleareyed adaptation to it. The series recognizes that nice guys do sometimes finish last. It just argues that other things are more important than finishing first.
James Poniewozik, "'Ted Lasso,' 'The Great North' and the Art of Nice." NYT, 2/11/2021.
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