Edward Hopper, Soir Bleu, 1914

1985 John Gotti hit on “Big Paul” Castellano

Płacząca fontanna, Portugalia, 1989, Eva Rubinstein

Willy Ronis, Marseille, 1963

“What is a thinker worth if he does not know how to escape from his own virtues occasionally? For he ought not to be only a moral being!”
—Daybreak, §510.

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd–The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (1982)

Herman Leonard, Paris, 1958

Italian artist and graphic novel pioneer, Dino Buzzati (1906-1972). Illustration from his Poema a fumetti (1969).

Tampa, W.A. Blake, 1982