In 1945, aboard a troopship with hundreds of soldiers returning stateside during WWII from CBI, Gutmann captured this photo. Always fascinated with visual language, he was attracted to the simplistic markings, and the love-tokens the returning soldiers displayed on their arms, legs, and chests.

The sleeping lady, Alaska

Vulnerability at its heart is the willingness to show up and be seen when you can’t control perception.

The piece is a meditation on death. Pärt's biographer, suggests that "how we live depends on our relationship with death: how we make music depends on our relationship to silence." It is significant that the piece begins and ends with silence—that the silence is written in the score. This silence creates a frame around the piece and has spiritual significance. It suggests that we come from silence, and return to silence; it reminds us that before we were born and after we die we are silent with respect to this world.

Finnish troops holding RK-62 rifles & wearing stahlhelms, late 1960s or 1970s

Unfinished Manhattan Bridge in 1908 and Today

Nothing that grieves us can be called little. By the eternal law of proportions a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of his crown are events of the same size.

- Mark Twain

T. S. Eliot, from "The Waste Land"

“Man’s fate knows no harsher misfortune than when those who have power on earth are not also the first men.”

—F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Part Four, “Conversation with the Kings,” §1 (excerpt).

Chechen rebel on horseback carrying what looks like is a FIM-92 Stinger, 1995.

This “withdrawal” from everything human and breaking off all connections is, with regard to creative work, the most magnificent human experience I know — with regard to concrete situations, it is the most repugnant thing one can encounter.
One’s heart is ripped from one’s body.
And the hardest thing is — such isolation cannot be defended by appeal to what it achieves, because there are no measures for that and because one cannot just make allowance for abandoning human relationships… With the burden of this necessary isolation, I always hope for complete isolation form the outside — for a merely apparent return to other people — and for the strength to keep an ultimate and constant distance.
For only then can all sacrifice be spared them, along with the necessary rejection.
But this tormented desire is not just unattainable, it is even forgotten — so much so that the most vital human relationships become a spring again and provide the forces that drive one into isolation once more…. Such a life then becomes wholly a matter of exigencies that have no justification.
Coming to terms with this in a positive way — not taking a position exclusively as a kind of escape — is what it means to be a philosopher.