“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

With trading debris all around him, a broker reads a newspaper in the New York Stock Exchange after closing, 1957

Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day; or the agonies which are have their origins in ecstasies which might have been.

David Bowie, 1973, East Berlin

Your first thought upon awakening be: ‘Atom’. For you should not begin your day with the illusion that what surrounds you is a stable world. Already to-morrow it can be ‘something that only has been’: for we, you, and I and our fellow men are ‘more mortal’ and 'more temporal’ than all who, until yesterday, had been considered mortal.

— Günther Anders, from “Commandments in the Atomic Age"

“Terrible experiences pose the riddle whether the person who has them is not terrible.”

—F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §89.

China. Guangxi province. 1980.

The corrupted heart. Chalk lessons. 1896

Serial killer Chikatilo is awoken to be excorted to his execution. 1994

Rainy Night Walk, Slaithwaite, West Yorkshire, England, 1984