only a complete alcoholic can think life is funny ... any life! ...

A destitute girl throws herself from a bridge, her life ruined by alcoholism (1848) - G. Cruikshank

In the whole of your absurd past you discover so much that's absurd, so much deceit and credulity, that it might be a good idea to stop being young this minute, to wait for youth to break away from you and pass you by, to watch it going away, receding in the distance, to see all its vanity, run your hand through the empty space it has left behind, take a last look at it, and then start moving, make sure your youth has really gone, and then calmly, all by yourself, cross to the other side of Time to see what people and things really look like.

- Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

Hytta Vaar Paa Staatoey, Theodor Severin Kittelsen

Memento Mori coffin ring in green enamel on hour-glass, 1715

In circumstances of real tragedy you see things straight away...past, present, and future together.

- Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Outside the Job Centre, John Frost Square, Newport, 1981.

Skaatoe, Theodor Severin Kittelsen

Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart.

- Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays

River of Grass, Kelly Reichardt, 1994

The Creek Fire burns along a hillside in the Cascadel Woods community of Madera County, California, 7 September 2020, Noah Berger

The Lady of the Sea (1901) - Plinio Nomellini

Tom Friedman, “untitled,” 1996

Adrian Piper, Untitled, 1968

Nails by Michiko Matsushita, 1999

No name. No memory today of yesterday’s name; of today’s name, tomorrow. If the name is the thing; if a name in us is the concept of every thing placed outside of us; and without a name you don’t have the concept, and the thing remains in us as if blind, indistinct and undefined: well then, let each carve this name that I bore among men, a funeral epigraph, on the brow of that image in which I appeared to him, and then leave it in peace, and let there be no more talk about it. It is fitting for the dead. For those who have concluded. I am alive and I do not conclude. Life does not conclude. And life knows nothing of names. This tree, tremulous pulse of new leaves. I am this tree. Tree, cloud; tomorrow book or wind: the book I read, the wind I drink. All outside, wandering.

- Luigi Pirandello, One, No One and One Hundred Thousand

The fairy dance (1895) - Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach

Berlin at night.
Secret capital of those whose trademark is ecstasic dancing stimulated by synthetic drugs and ear numbing electronic music.