music

Snatches of a quartet squirted from a cafe with scarlet awnings reminded me of Clea once saying: "Music was invented to confirm human loneliness."

- Lawrence Durrell
Clea

faith

...the prodigious paradox of faith, a paradox that makes a murder into a holy and God-pleasing act, a paradox that gives Isaac back to Abraham again, which no thought can grasp, because faith begins precisely where thought stops...

- Soren Kierkegaard
Fear and Trembling

Jazz Club 2008

Photo: Meredith Machemer, chef, caterer and sometimes photographer

freedom

"I didn't know that freedom is not a reward or decoration that is celebrated with champagne. Nor yet a gift, a box of dainties designed to make you lick your chops. Oh, no! It's a chore, on the contrary, and a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting."

- Albert Camus
The Fall

sunshine on a grey day

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1zk3OsIPus&feature=related

big pictures...

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/

the old ethic

"He climbed out of the valley, wondering if he were mad. But if so, he preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free. He did not want that old sanity of the world, which was become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found world of his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying.

As for the certain grief he felt at the same time, in his soul, that was only the remains of an old ethic, that bade a human being adhere to humanity. But he was weary of the old ethic, of the human being, and of humanity."

-D.H. Lawrence
Women in Love

release

"Whether it is a good thing or a bad thing, smashing things is also sometimes very pleasant."

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Notes from Underground

our finest impulses

"Everyday we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty."

- Henry Miller
Sexus