“No one can extract more from things —persons, books and writings included— than he already knows. For what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear for”

— Nietzsche

“A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it, an apostle is hardly likely to look out."

— Lichtenberg (The Aphorism Book)

Athanasius Kircher, Earth’s interior, 1665

the earth is an incognito garden of riches and wonders, the gods have already encrypted their highest wisdom for the man who understood the symbolism of paradise as meaning that of the earth but hidden in its entrails from the inquisitive eye: in its black ichor and molten blood, in its divine magnetic currents, in its inexhaustible powers of renewal and rebirth. Ever it builds itself upon its own fallen half, raising life from death, form from dissolution, abundance from decay.

"He looks upon things and persons, bowed and discerning, like a mad entomologist and from behind the screen of professional earnestness he almost takes pleasure in what is revealed by his gushing light of desire, in what a surprised and defenseless face unconsciously offers of its grace or misery, in an anatomized nudity, in front of an inner strength or just a presumption. All this could seem meaninglessly cruel if his desire were not always fused with mercy, a mercy born out of a profound and clear understanding of the mortal weakness common to matter and to our senses. Seen through his desire, humans and things suffer and reveal the same fate."

— Carlo Mollino on Man Ray

https://www.aldiwan.net/poem35922.html

لعلّها من أبدع ما طالعتُ في باب المديح؛ وإن كنتُ لا أميل إلى المديح لما يشوبه من إفراطٍ ومبالغة، فإنّي لا أملك إلّا أن أقرّ بجمال هذه القصيدة.

Wilhelm Rode as Wotan and Henny Trundt as Brünnhilde
in Richard Wagner's "Die Walküre", Act 2
Munich, 1933

"You speak to Wotan's will,
you tell me what you want;
who am I, if I were not your will?"

gothic cathedrals are forests made of stone, the blend of the brutal and the sublime.

further reflections on architecture:


Light pours through the columns as though it were blood coursing through the membranes of a human heart, reviving, animating, and quietly nourishing the building from within. It is the soul of the structure, that which sustains and enlivens it, and never a mere accessory or a stupendous luxury. Rather, it is just as essential as the artistic structure itself, for it is the background against which the transparent totality of the building is exhibited.

The beautiful outward buildings of man are made to conform to his inward life. Each feeling, emotion, memory, image, and thought is incarnated in a particular arch, room, cellar, attic, or ornament. The harmony that pervades the interior soul is reflected in the harmony that pervades the interior of a building. A color becomes the symbol of a feeling, or of its subtle gradations; a drawer or cabinet serves as an extension of living memory; and the very form of structures stands as the instantiation of thought itself.

Every architect, in the succession of his works, dreams of a kind of divine penultimate, one through which his genius and the full height of his artistic skill might finally be incarnated.

It is equally possible that a particular architectural epoch may itself represent, and exhaust, the highest possibilities of the art: past, in that it gathers and refines the finest achievements of earlier styles; future, in that it offers a supreme model toward which all imitation thereafter inevitably turns.

the dog by Francisco Goya.