Fra Filippo Lippi, Herod's Banquet, c. 1450
Suddenly I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparkling flames shooting out from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again. There was no chance to send money to either wife if he took all his savings out of the bank and bought a car. Everything was up, the jig and all. Behind him charred ruins smoked.
Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957
It goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging, this majestic roof fretted with golden fire—why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving, how express and admirable, in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god—the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1601
You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
nickkahler reblogged
Paul Klee, Forest Architecture, 1925 (via mythofblue)
Only animals who are below civilization and the angels who are beyond it can be sincere. Human beings are, necessarily, actors who cannot become something before they have first pretended to be it; and they can be divided, not into the hypocritical and the sincere, but into the sane who know they are acting and the mad do not.
W.H. Auden, "On Sincerity," c. 1960
Odilon Redon, On the Horizon, the Angel of Certitude, and in the Dark Sky, A Questioning Glance, 1882
Odilon Redon, Angel in Chains, c. 1875
I've always thought we were like fat angels that could not fly.
Jaume Plensa, TEDx Talk at SMU, Dallas, TX, 2011
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Witold Pruszkowski, Falling Star, 1884 (via mbelt)
Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, The Soul Breaking the Bonds that Attach to the Land, c. 1820