Vertigo, accompanied by the New York Philharmonic

Jana Sterbak, Artist As Combustible, 1986

Alexander McQueen, by Nick Knight for Talk Magazine, 1999

Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what’s called at home.

How to Look at Art, Arts & Architecture, Ad Reinhardt, January 1947

Disgust relies on moral obtuseness. It is possible to view another human being as a slimy slug or a piece of revolting trash only if one has never made a serious good-faith attempt to see the world through that person’s eyes or to experience that person’s feelings. Disgust imputes to the other a subhuman nature. How, by contrast, do we ever become able to see one another as human? Only through the exercise of imagination.
- Martha Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity

A tattooed worker smoking a pipe, Kronoberg County, Sweden, 1940s

Duel between Onegin and Lenski (1899) by Ilya Repin (1844 - 1930)

Ushiku's Daibutsu, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan

“Appearance is for me the sublime consistency and interrelatedness of all knowledge perhaps is and will be the highest means to preserve the universality of dreaming, the mutual comprehension of all dreamers, and the continuation of the dream.”

—The Gay Science, §54 (edited excerpt).