“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).

“What makes a person noble? The feeling of heat in things that feel cold to everybody else, the discovery of values of which no scales have been invented yet, the offering of sacrifices on altars that are dedicated to an unknown god, a courage without desire for honors, and a self-sufficiency that overflows and gives to men and things. It was this rare standard and an unawareness to it that made a person noble. To become the advocate of that which most preserves the species might be the ultimate form and refinement in which noblemindedness reveals itself on earth.”

—The Gay Science, §55 (edited).

Poster Design by Kazumasa Nagai, 1970s

Nico Kok, Curved Picture, 1992

Oh, melancholy, how poor I would be without you drawing my attention to this or that. Yesterday it was the wild plum blossoms along the brief road to today, and today it’s this rain that will rain only once. Each grain of sand on each shingle lights for an instant, like a window across a black lake, and then the tiny shade is drawn, as time strikes the wet panes and glances away. Tomorrow, too, you will be waiting with something to show me. That time, for example, when you dipped a spoon into the plain water of an ordinary day, then lifted it, salty with tears, to my lips.

–Ted Kooser, from “May,” The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book (University Nebraska Press, 2014)

“Who knows how many others there were who might say that their existence consisted of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense, a nonsense that had nothing unique about it at all and that had nothing behind it or beyond it except more and more nonsense - a new order of nonsense, perhaps an utterly unknown nonsense, but all of it nonsense and nothing but nonsense.”

- Thomas Ligotti, The Clown Puppet

Twilight in Sologne, 1867, Theodore Rousseau

Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema