Booklover

“Have you ever looked at, say, a picture or a great building or read a paragraph in a book and felt the world suddenly expand and, in the same instant, contract and harden into a kernel of perfect purity? Do you know what I mean? Everything suddenly fits, everything’s in its place.”

diving into Han Kang, who won’t the Nobel Prize for literature in 2024 📖 reblog is ok, don’t repost/use

All the conditions of modern life—its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed. What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.

“…to paint the halo of things. The halo is more important than the things and than the words […].”

ALT

Andrea Gibson, from The Madness Vase. [ID in alt text]

“Sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.”

“Everything is biography, Lucien Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border we cross.”