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pietro designs
Ah! the morning air that has not yet been breathed, how life-giving it seems to body and soul! Bernard follows the railings of the Luxembourg Gardens, goes down the Rue Bonaparte, reaches the quays, crosses the Seine. He thinks of the new rule of life which he has only lately formulated: "If I don't do it, who will? If I don't do it at once, when shall I?" He thinks: "Great things to do!" He feels that he is going towards them. "Great things!" he repeats to himself, as he walks along. If only he knew what they were!... In the meantime he knows that he is hungry; here he is at the Halles. He has eight sous in his pocket - not a sou more! He goes into a public house and takes a roll and coffee, standing at the bar. Price, six sous. He has two sous left; he gallantly leaves one on the counter and holds out the other to a ragamuffin who is grubbing in a dustbin. Charity? Swagger? What does it matter? He feels as a happy as a king. He has nothing left - and the whole world is his! -- Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters 1925 (From the chapter "Bernard Awakens") * * *
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* * * No artist recognizes any standard of beauty but that which is
suggested by his own temperament. The artist seeks to realize in a certain
material his Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. So far from being the creation of its time, art is usually in direct opposition to it. Autobiography is irresistible...when people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting. The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly one feels that behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual. -- Oscar Wilde 1854-1900 * * * I tried for years to live according to everyone else's morality. I tried to live like everyone else, to be like everyone else. I said the right things even when I felt and thought quite differently. And the result is a catastrophe. -- Albert Camus * * *
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-- Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) 1819 * * *
-- Maria M. Smith, Published in the Rockford Review, February 1999 * * *
* * * I believe in Michael Angelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) * * *
-- John Keats 1820 (This is the poem Percy Bysshe Shelley was reading on July 8,1822 as he sailed into the tempest in the Bay of Spezia from which he never returned.) * * *
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* * * When we have once known Rome, and left her where she lies, like a long decaying corpse, retaining a trace of the noble shape it was, but with accumulated dust and a fungus growth overspreading all its more admirable features; - left her in utter weariness, no doubt, of her narrow, crooked, intricate streets, so uncomfortably paved with little squares of lava that to tread over them is a penitential pilgrimage, so indescribably ugly, moreover, so cold, so alleylike, into which the sun never falls, and where a chill wind forces its deadly breath into our lungs; - left her, tired of the sight of those immense, seven-storied, yellow-washed hovels, or call them palaces, where all that is dreary in domestic life seems magnified and multiplied, and weary of climbing those staircases, which ascend from a ground-floor of cook-shops, coblers' stalls, stables, and regiments of cavalry, to a middle region of princes, cardinals, and ambassadours, and an upper tier of artists, just beneath the unattainable sky; - left her, worn out with shivering at the cheerless and smoky fireside, by day, and feasting with our own substance the ravenous little populace of a Roman bed, at night; - left her, sick at heart of Italian trickery, which has uprooted whatever faith in man's integrity had endured till now, and sick at stomach of sour bread, sour wine, rancid butter, and bad cookery, needlessly bestowed on evil meats; - left her, disgusted with the pretence of Holiness and the reality of Nastiness, each equally omnipresent; - left her, half-lifeless from the lanquid atmosphere, the vital principle of which has been used up, long ago, or corrupted by myriads of slaughters; - left her, crushed down in spirit with the desolation of her ruin, and the hopelessness of her future; - left her, in short hating her with all our might, and adding our individual curse to the Infinite Anathema which her old crimes have mistakeably brought down; - when we have left Rome in such a mood as this, we are astonished by the discovery, by-and-by, that our heart-strings have mysteriously attached themselves to the Eternal City, and are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were more familiar, more intimately our home, than even the spot where we were born! -- "The Marble Faun" (1859) by Nathaniel Hawthorne * * * From one of the windows of this saloon, we may see a flight of broad stone steps, descending along side the antique and massive foundation of the Capitol, towards the battered triumphal arch of Septimius Severus, right below. Farther on, the eye skirts along the edge of the desolate Forum (where Roman washerwomen hang out their linen to the sun), passing over a shapeless confusion of modern edifices, piled rudely up with ancient brick and stone, and over the domes of Christian churches, built on the old pavements of heathen temples, and supported by the very pillars that once upheld them. At a distance beyond - yet but a little way, considering how much history is heaped into the intervening space - rises the great sweep of the Coliseum, with the blue sky brightening through its upper tier of arches. Far off, the view is shut in by the Alban Mountains, looking just the same, amid all this decay and change, as when Romulus gazed thitherward over his half-finished wall. We glance hastily at these things, - at this bright sky, and those blue distant mountains, and at the ruins, Etruscan, Roman, Christian, venerable with a threefold antiquity, and at the company of world-famous statues in the saloon, - in the hope of putting the reader into that state of feeling which is experienced oftenest at Rome. It is a vague sense of ponderous remembrances; a perception of such weight and density in a by-gone life, of which this spot was the centre, that the present moment is pressed down or crowded out, and our individual affairs and interests are but half as real here as elsewhere....... -- "The Marble Faun" (1859) by Nathaniel Hawthorne * * *
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* * * Beautiful the soft, soft plunging motion of oxen moving forwards. Beautiful the strange, snaky lifting of the muzzles, the swaying of the sharp horns. And the soft, soft crawling motion of a team of oxen, so invisible, almost, yet so inevitable. Now and again straight canals of water flashed blue. Now and again the great lines of grey-silvery poplars rose and made avenues or lovely grey airy quadrangles across the plain. Their top boughs were spangled with gold and green leaf. Sometimes the vine-leaves were gold and red, a patterning. And the great square farm-homesteads, white, red-roofed, with their outbuildings, stood naked amid the lands, without screen or softening. There was something big and exposed about it all. No more cosy English ambushed life: no longer the cosy littleness of the landscape. A bigness - and nothing to shelter the unshrinking spirit. It was all exposed, exposed to the sweep of plain, to the high strong sky, and to human gaze. A kind of boldness, an indifference. Aaron was impressed and fascinated. He looked with a new interest at the Italians in the carriage with him - for this same boldness and indifference and exposed gesture. And he found it in them too. And again it fascinated him. It seemed so much bigger, as if the walls of life had fallen. Nay, the walls of English life will have to fall. -- David Herbert Lawrence, "Aaron's Rod" * * * The kingly brilliance of Sirius pierced the eye with a steely glitter, the star called Capella was yellow, Aldebaran and Betelgueux shone with a fiery red. To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement. -- Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), Thomas Hardy 1840-1928 * * * The mediocre teacher tells. * * * Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. * * * ...knowledge is ultimately self-knowledge, and self-knowledge is the soul
seen by itself. * * * Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit. * * * * * *
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