R.L. Swihart's Blog, page 84

Monet @ L'Orangerie

 Monet's Water Lilies @ L'Orangerie (2019).

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From Doctor Zhivago

   To this rule the boy was a bitter and painful exception. His mainspring remained a sense of care, and no feeling of unconcern lightened or ennobled it. He knew he had this inherited trait and with self-conscious alertness caught signs of it in himself. It upset him. Its presence humiliated him. 

   For as long as he could remember, he had never ceased to marvel at how, with the same arms and legs and a common language and habits, one could be not like everyone else, and besides that, be someone who was liked by few, someone who was not loved. He could not understand a situation in which, if you were worse than others, you could not make an effort to correct yourself and become better. What did it mean to be a Jew? Why was there such a thing? What could reward or justify this unarmed challenge that brought nothing but grief?

Bradbury Building @ Xmas

 Downtown LA. The Bradbury Building @ Xmas (2018).

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Long Beach Howloween 2019

 Long Beach. Howloween Parade 2019. Blast from the Past. 

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Long Beach Howloween Parade 2019

Long Beach. Haute Dog Howloween Parade 2019. Blast from the Past.

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Colorado Lagoon (10. 14. 20)

Long Beach. Colorado Lagoon. Morning Swim. Walking. 10.14.20

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From Pasternak's Zhivago

 But that’s all rubbish. Let’s go back to what we were talking about. I said we must be faithful to Christ. I’ll explain at once. You don’t understand that one can be an atheist, one can not know whether God exists or why, and at the same time know that man does not live in nature but in history, and that in present-day understanding it was founded by Christ, that its foundation is the Gospel. And what is history? It is the setting in motion of centuries of work at the gradual unriddling of death and its eventual overcoming. Hence the discovery of mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, hence the writing of symphonies. It is impossible to move on in that direction without a certain uplift. These discoveries call for spiritual equipment. The grounds for it are contained in the Gospel. They are these. First, love of one’s neighbor, that highest form of living energy, overflowing man’s heart and demanding to be let out and spent, and then the main component parts of modern man, without which he is unthinkable—namely, the idea of the free person and the idea of life as sacrifice. Bear in mind that this is still extremely new. The ancients did not have history in this sense. Then there was the sanguinary swinishness of the cruel, pockmarked Caligulas, who did not suspect how giftless all oppressors are. They had the boastful, dead eternity of bronze monuments and marble columns. Ages and generations breathed freely only after Christ. Only after him did life in posterity begin, and man now dies not by some fence in the street, but in his own history, in the heat of work devoted to the overcoming of death, dies devoted to that theme himself. Ouf, I’m all in a sweat, as they say. But you can’t even make a dent in him!” “Metaphysics, old boy. It’s forbidden me by my doctors; my stomach can’t digest it.” “Well, God help you. Let’s drop it. Lucky man! What a view you have from here—I can’t stop admiring it! And he lives and doesn’t feel it.”

Huntington Beach

 Huntington. Pier. Beach. Main St. Walking. Etc.

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Boris Pasternak

He's always intrigued me. Stumbling through some of his later poetry (I discovered "Sister" years ago in a secondhand bookstore years ago in Ann Arbor: it bowled me over). Thinking about rereading Doctor Zhivago (I know: Nabokov didn't like it). A couple "clips" from the intro by Richard Pevear:

A quote by Pasternak (in a letter to Stephen Spender):

I would pretend (metaphorically) to have seen nature and universe themselves not as a picture made or fastened on an immovable wall, but as a sort of painted canvas roof or curtain in the air, incessantly pulled and blown and flapped by a something of an immaterial unknown and unknowable wind. 

—BORIS PASTERNAK Letter (in English) to Stephen Spender, August 22, 1959

***

Pevear speaking:

Pasternak always had a double view of the revolution. He saw it, on the one hand, as a justified expression of the need of the people, and, on the other, as a program imposed by “professional revolutionaries” that was leading to a deadly uniformity and mediocrity. His doubts began as early as 1918 and increased as time went on.

The Insanity of Poetry

 Wislawa Szymborska said (or should've if she didn't): I prefer the insanity of writing poetry to the insanity of not writing poetry.

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