Hugo Simberg, The Wounded Angel, 1903.
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Léon Spilliaert, Winter round the lake, 1929.
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Sculpture by Tung Ming-Chin.
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Hans Christian Anderson's sun troll.
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"I suppose I’m trying to make a space where people can rest their attention in one place for a while."
'Time is incredibly flexible and we all experience it in different ways,' Ogden explains. ... In Iraq, for example, people she surveyed almost universally felt that time slowed. But half of U.K. respondents who experienced time distortion felt it moved faster than in what we've come to think of as 'the before times.' In Argentina, younger, physically active women felt time passed faster than older men. Ogden says it's hard to pinpoint the root cause of those differences, because there are so many different variables. Living in a war-torn area, or under strict lockdown policies, could help explain the differences in each country. 'When life changes, time changes,' Ogden says.
Yuki Noguchi, "How Did COVID Warp Our Sense of Time? It's a Matter of Perception." NPR's Morning Edition, December 14, 2022.
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The imperative to always demonstrate the right stuff shaped the language that astronauts used to describe their experiences in space. As Patricia Santy, a longtime psychiatrist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, in Houston, wrote in 1994, “Expression of emotions such as sadness or fear is considered a weakness.” If the sight of Earth marooned in darkness inspired such feelings in the heart of an astronaut, he was unlikely to admit it, lest he jeopardize his shot at another mission. ... Weibel, who conducts anonymous interviews of astronauts for her research, said that one told her he took one look out the window of the space shuttle and “became absolutely convinced we would kill ourselves off between 500 and 1,000 years from now.” He never said so publicly.
Marina Koren, "Seeing Earth From Space Will Change You; The Question is How." The Atlantic, December 10, 2022.
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Because of the tutoring, because it is a Teaching Monday after a Friday payday, because I am delirious after three solid hours of two different seminars of two dozen sulky first-years, I buy sneakers I unnecessarily tried on and coveted last week. Cycle of unnecessary shopping becoming rationalized into necessary purchase. I want a uniform. Everything I buy will be the last thing.
My mom texts me an article about uniform shopping, “what if you buy yourself a uniform, a capsule closet,” she suggests. But what if I have claustrophobia.
Adrienne Raphel, "Shopping Diary." The Paris Review, November 25, 2022.
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She was afraid of finding someone else’s thoughts left behind in her personality, like a strange scarf unearthed from the sofa cushions after a party. Books were the most acute threat to the sanctity of the bordered self.
Audrey Wollen, "The Writer Who Burned Her Own Books." The New Yorker, January 3, 2023.
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Is there ever anything sham about it, I sometimes wondered reading Tenth of December, moving toward one of his deaths or near-deaths. A cheapness? There was a whiff of robin funerals, of that kid who wants to feel the feeling, something you don’t get with, say, Flannery O’Connor, who might actually have killed people. Then again, robin funerals are kind of the business: a little thing to put in a box, so that the rest of us can be glad to feel alive.
Patricia Lockwood, "Worm Interlude." London Review of Books, November 17, 2022.
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