"All work is an act of philosophy."

The root of art and decline of faith

"He thought that fear of death was perhaps the root of all art, perhaps also of all things of the mind. We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do."

-Narcissus and Goldmund by Herman Hesse (an excerpt)

This particular passage does not mirror my own beliefs. I rather like to think that all creation is done to canonize the beauty in life but see so many examples that are summed up so well by this description. Take Guernica, for example, or every Carissa's Wierd* song you have ever heard. This weighed on me pretty heavily when I first read it and thought it would be worth sharing.

(*Yes, weird is spelled incorrectly but there's a reason this group was referred to by so many

music critics as "music's spelling bee champs".)

from ali : on coming home

“[Home] is the center from which we define and understand

the nature of everything we encounter in the world.

The home . . . is not one thing among many in a world of things; nor is it merely the product of a culture.

Rather, the world of things derives its sense,

and a culture its significance,

from their relationship to the home.

Without the home, everything else in the world or in a culture is meaningless.”

- David Patterson -

For the past four weeks my primary creative project has been piecing - and at times pulling - together a living space, and the process has me thinking about homes, about their all too-frequent lack - of the sprawling several thousand square feet structures passing through my office with vaulted ceilings more conducive to admiration than comfort, formal dining rooms designed to entertain rather than embrace. But as criticism is bloodless without conviction and conviction fruitless without action, I'm striving to start in my quite literal backyard, and struggling to grasp the essence of what a home should be when so many have become just another place.

Your Father's the light within all that you see

He fills up the ponds as He empties the clouds
Holds without hands and He speaks without sounds
He provides us with the cow's waste and coconuts to eat
Giving one that nice salt taste, and the other its sweet

Sends the black carriage the day death shows its face
Thinning our numbers with kindness and grace
And just as a flower and its fragrance are one
So must each of you and your Father become

-mewithoutYou
King Beetle on a Coconut Estate

Raiding Eternity

I tilt the picture in my hands just a bit until I can see the scratches on the matte surface. There are hundreds of little indentions, tracks from fingernails showing the many times the photo has been held.

When we scan this picture in those scuffs will disappear. The rest of the world will see only the young, bearded man smiling in some sepia living room. They'll increment the file's viewcount by one, leaving their own perfect hash mark. It won't be the same as the photo I'm holding in my hands, shifting in the light to read its physical metadata, but it won't be inferior, either.

– Joel Johnson, “Raiding Eternity”

belief and explanatory reports

"I guess we're all, or most of us, the wards of the nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. The things we couldn't explain went right on but surely not with our blessing. We did not see what we couldn't explain, and meanwhile a great part of the world was abandoned to children, insane people, fools, and mystics, who were more interested in what is than in why it is. So many old and lovely things are stored in the worlds's attic, because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out."

"The Winter of Our Discontent"

-Steinbeck

Humor

"Humour is for them the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life. Hence, it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame. If a man simply lets others pay for him, he is 'mean,' but if he boasts of it in a jocular manner and twits his fellows with having been scored off, he is no longer 'mean' but a comical fellow. Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humourous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can be passed off as funny. Cruelty is shameful -- unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke. A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help towards a man's damnation so much as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a Joke."