The round Temple of Hercules in the Forum Boarium, Rome, Italy
Pergamon Altar Gigantomachy Frieze Detail of Leto thrusting a torch into the face of the giant, Tityus
2nd Century B.C.
The Battle of Chaeronea 338 BC.
“The Crossing” by Katrin Koenning
“Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are!”
—Ernst Jünger, On Pain
Conscious pain > Pain outsourced to the unconscious
Abandon all your coping mechanisms. Stay conscious. Feel every weight of the moment. Press even harder for what feels painful.
What you try to detach from never goes away. It seeps into your unconscious, compounding and waiting to be dealt with another day.
Image text: "Because you will pay an emotional price for your inaction. When your life isn't lined up with how you believe you should be living, you pay the price for that, internally. It's hard to be happy when you're not doing the things you value and believe in."
“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”
— Goethe
“‘Taste is relative’ is the excuse adopted by those eras that have bad taste. […] The modernist thirst for originality makes the mediocre artist believe that the secret of originality consists simply in being different.”
— Nicolas Gomez Davila
The North Water (2021)
The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1939)
the blood moon over the temple of Apollo | Corinth, Greece
"I am ready to meet any man and to try his mettle. In whatever contests men practice anywhere, I can play my part without disgrace. I know well enough how to wield the bow. My arrow would be the first to find its mark in a throng of foemen, even though the friends at my side were many and each of them took aim at his man."
—Homer, The Odyssey