Paula Modersohn-Becker, Rural road with red house, ca. 1902.
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Bocca Della Verità headboard by Mario Ceroli, 2015.
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Long fruits jacket by Aprés Ski.
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Natural pigments in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.
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Georgiana Houghton, The Eye of the Lord (reverse), 1864. Collection of the Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia.*
George Eliot, Middlemarch.
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Noga Arikha, from The Ceiling Outside: The Science and Experience of the Disrupted Mind, excerpted in Book Post.
The grievance I find in the Cours de la Fidélité is the barbarous manner in which the authorities have cut these vigorous plane trees and clipped them to the quick. In fact they really resemble with their dwarfed, rounded and flattened heads the most vulgar plants of the vegetable garden ... But the wish of M. the mayor is despotic, and all the trees belonging to the municipality are ruthlessly pruned twice a year. ... An old Surgeon-Major of Napoleon's Italian Army, who was living in retirement at Verrières, and who had been in his time described by M. the mayor as both a Jacobin and a Bonapartiste, dared to complain to the mayor one day of the periodical mutilation of these fine trees.
"I like the shade," answered M. de Rênal, with just a tinge of that hauteur which becomes a mayor when he is talking to a surgeon, who is a member of the Legion of Honour. "I like the shade, I have my trees clipped in order to give shade, and I cannot conceive that a tree can have any other purpose, provided of course it is not bringing in any profit, like the useful walnut tree."
This is the great word which is all decisive at Verrières. ... Bringing in profit is the consideration which decides everything in this little town which you thought so pretty.
Stendhal, The Red and the Black, translated by Horace B. Samuel.
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When we dig roots, we make little holes. When we build houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don’t ruin things. We shake down acorns and pine nuts. We don’t chop down the trees. We only use dead wood. But the white people plow up the ground, pull up the trees, kill everything. The tree says, “Don’t. I am sore. Don’t hurt me.” But they chop it down and cut it up. The spirit of the land hates them. They blast out trees and stir it up to its depths. They saw up the trees. That hurts them. The Indians never hurt anything, but the white people destroy all. They blast rocks and scatter them on the earth. The rock says, “Don’t! You are hurting me.” But the white people pay no attention. When the Indians use rocks, they take little round ones for their cooking. The white people dig deep long tunnels. They make roads. They dig as much as they wish. They don’t care how much the ground cries out. How can the spirit of the earth like the white man?
Kate Luckie, "The Water Will Come." Excerpted in Lapham's Quarterly, "Climate" issue, Fall 2019.
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A Wintun shaman, Kate Luckie attributed her powers to a supernatural experience she underwent as her son lay dying. She is known for a prophecy she gave about how the world would end: “Everywhere the white man has touched it, it is sore. It looks sick. So it gets even by killing him when he blasts. But eventually the water will come.”
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The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present; it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life; it is a still-quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
George Eliot, Middlemarch.
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We know that without the sense of temporality embedded within memory, there would be no unitary self, and many emotions dependent on representing what is not immediately present to the mind would not exist—hope, anxiety, regret, pride, sadness, joy, love, guilt. Yet change is embedded within the very current of a unitary, subjective life. We have that “core self” that we feel to be so strong, for instance, in a loved one with dementia. We build an identity through time that is also outside us: things age, and we age in time, all things relative to each other. Being is being in time, in each others’ time.
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Deborah Eisenberg, "Condemned to Life," a review of Jacqueline Harpman's I Who Have Never Known Men in The New York Review of Books, 7/21/2022.
I was gradually forgetting my story. At first, I shrugged, telling myself that it would be no great loss, since nothing had happened to me, but soon I was shocked by that thought. After all, if I was a human being, my story was as important as that of King Lear or of Prince Hamlet that William Shakespeare had taken the trouble to relate in detail.
Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men.
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The book suggests, repeatedly and in many ways, that perhaps our most essential quality is a void, an incompleteness—that what we need in order to be fully human is to sense something beyond our reach, a future, some possibility, something to be desired or learned or made or done or loved. And that it’s this sense of the something more that kindles imagination, longing, acts of mind—the experiences that enable us to feel human and make life worth living.
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"Urgency is a wretched condition."
*Microchimerism refers to the exchange of fetal and maternal cells in the womb. The term comes from the Chimera of Greek myth, a monster made up of the parts of various animals. The fetus’s cells are able to pass into the mother’s body through the bloodstream, but the maternal cells can also enter the fetal body through the placenta. And, although this is less likely, a grandmother’s cells may also enter her grandchild’s body. As fetal cells are capable of adapting to the maternal tissue—like foreigners learning a new language—they insert themselves in various organs to become part of the mother’s body. We are made of others.
Jazmina Barrera, translated by Christina McSweeney. From Linia Negra, excerpted in Book Post.
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Lynda Barry in the NYT: "We’re born into a world that’s full of stories and characters that are right there for us. God, 'Grimms’ Fairy Tales' saved my ass."
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With the theoretical physicist Przemek Witaszczyk I developed an algorithm to identify specific plant species that insects would find most attractive. The resulting garden, made up of 7,000 plants, might look random to the human eye, but it’s very tasteful if you happen to be aDaisy Ginsberg, talking in The Gentlewoman newsletter about creating the Pollinator Pathmaker, "a 55-meter living sculpture for pollinators."
bee.
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Related: Ginsberg's tool for creating a pollinator garden.
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