“beauty”
58 posts under this tag.
Have only read 3 quotes of it and it may already be one of my favorite books ;)
Tears came to him. He wept quietly, holding nothing back. He mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute.
There’s a universe of potential, Lindsay, think of that. No rules, no limits.
Life moves in clades. A clade is a daughter species, a related descendant. It’s happened to other successful animals, and now it’s humanity’s turn. The factions still struggle, but the categories are breaking up. No faction can claim the one true destiny for mankind. Mankind no longer exists.
Sarah Manguso wrote a short memoir on her 9 years with a strange, terrible, Guillain Barre -ish disease: The Two Kinds of Decay. There’s something about her style—short paragraphs, understatement, detachment—that compels me, and though on occasion she can be clumsy with metaphors, she can write fragments of simple, unexpected poignancy:
I waited seven years to forget just enough—so that when I tried to remember, I could do it thoroughly. There are only a few things to remember now, and the lost things are absolutely, comfortingly gone.
Hadn’t been so taken by painting since Klimt or Schiele. I love these self-portraits. The solid colors, the roughness, the sloppy daubs, the rawness, the sexuality, the odd angles, the sharp, geometrical lines, the intimacy, the posing, the light.
This is Sara Sisun, and I stumbled on her work on Stanford’s Cumming Arts building.
Whoodathunkit? Yahoo!’s omg! gossip rag is one of the most enticing and innovative web interfaces I’ve seen in a while.
I studied math in college because I didn’t believe it. Never could understand how or why someone would come up with the stuff we were being teached. Thanks to some innate verbal ability and motherly discipline, I was thankfully “good” at it though, good enough to realize that what we were “learning” was nothing but mindless regurgitation.
No creo que ganen tales o cuales caballos porque les apostamos, sino que les apostamos para legitimar mejor nuestro deseo de que ganen, de que el ganar los haga nuestros.
..no deseamos a nuestros amantes por su belleza, sino que deseamos que tengan belleza para asi poder justificar nuestro deseo.
Fernando Savater, A caballo entre milenios, emphasis mine
I don’t believe these or those horses win because we bet on them, rather that we bet on them to better legitimize our desire for them to win, for them to become ours in their winning.
..we don’t desire our lovers for their beauty, we rather desire that they be beautiful so that we may justify our desire.
I can barely believe that this blog has been up for 2 years already (!) and I had’t yet posted this quote, which is one of all my all time favorites.
I wasn’t expecting such beauty. It caught me off guard today. There was a time, just after midday, as I walked along Ocean Beach, when it all overwhelmed me—the slapping wind, the silly birds, the fellow walkers, the kiting surfers, the full sky, the white rocks, the nature right besides, the glistening, sparkling, glimmering, scintillating water.
[San Francisco] children are to be pitied, for, as the wife of publishing magnate Nelson Doubleday once said, “They will probably grow up thinking all cities are so wonderful.”
Oh, and I just bought an apple for 1.75 dollars.
This has to be one of the best sex interfaces ever. Breathtaking:
So all these animals, having left the sea, solved the problems of moving around and breathing air in their own differing ways. But there was another difficulty, mating. In the sea, animals need only release their eggs and sperm and the water mixed the two together. On dry land that couldn’t happen, even for the most moisture-loving of creatures. An individual slug carries both male and female organs. But even then, that was of no help. Each had to both give and receive. Somehow or other, pairs of individuals had to get together and the ways the have evolved in which to do so are quite extraordinary. Indeed, some of them are almost beyond imagining.
The leopard slug, you might think, has the simplest of habits. Maybe, but not when it comes to mating. When an individual is looking for a partner it give its trail of slime a special taste that advertises the fact. Another, if it feels the same way, will detect the invitation and start to follow. The pursuer, to confirm that it’s there and it’s ready to mate, gives the pursued a nibble. The leader heads upwards. An overhand is what’s neeeded. The underside of a branch will do very nicely. The two start to circle one another more and more closely until they entwine. For an hour or so they continue to wind themselves around one another. Then, suddenly, the pair releases their hold on the branch and start to slide downwards on a rope of mucus.
Now, in midair, they move to the next stage in their pairing. Each everts its male organ from just behind its head. These grow longer and longer. Then they, too, begin to entwine. They fan out to form a translucent, flower-like globe. And now, at last, sperm passes from one slug to another. The transfer is complete. Each has been fertilized.
Finally, their strange, balletic relationship comes to an end… with a bump.
Terry Rodgers paints entrancing glimpses at raw hedonism—modern, American, urban, Grey’s-Anatomy diverse, indolent, excessive, impudent. Set in sumptuous, soap-operatic locales, youth and beauty are squandered in complex orgies of many bodies and many layers. Epicurean pigs, lotus eaters, Klimtian nymphs, frozen in their idle shuffle for our ogling. Though the paintings are in a way surprisingly chaste—nudes showing nothing that the Greeks didn’t sculpt—what both beguiles and offends is that insolent, apathic wallowing in excess—no one ever smiles, this isn’t about happiness, it’s about pleasure. (Via nudonation.)
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death.
Elie Wiesel, US News & World Report (October 27, 1986)
I had only heard the first sentence of the quote before. All together (particularly thanks to the end-repeatal) it’s even more powerful. And it’s true.
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