The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space. ~Italo Calvino
Commonplace book of a teacher, poet, and counselor.
Maurice Denis
Easter Morning or Easter Mystery 1891
Naked Women with Cats by Félix Vallotton, 1897-1898
Flood Disaster, 1951, by Thomas Hart Benton
Still Life with Profile of Laval, 1886, by Paul Gauguin
Two Women Washing, 1876-1878, by Edgar Degas
Detail of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Comtesse d’Haussonville