MihaElla ’s Reviews > Landscape Painted with Tea > Status Update

The human soul is a small house, & the room of the soul has its own furniture. This furniture is our present. IF we nurtured, educated, & brought up our present, if we devoted the same attention to it that we devote to our past and future (which are the walls of the soul), perhaps it could develop, perhaps it could expand, burgeon, and grow at the expense of these walls that are the past and the future...

Our body carries its soul on its back like a huge stone or starry mist. The boundary of that soul or that starry mist is not here, where you stand, but, rather, extends as far as your eye can see, as far as your ear can hear, or as far as your mind can stretch, up on high or down under the ground. Your body cannot be in the place of another body, but the mist of your soul...

We judge this element differently (the Future), depending on our powers. I and those like me believe that time is curved. He who has his eye aimed in the right direction does not need to predict the future, he simply sees and reads it behind the curves of our days. Because the future (& in it death) is already visible from the present, as are the past and our birth. For man does not see much of the past either.

My soul is a virgin who gave birth to my body. & to my voice within it. That voice I wash every morning, the way one washes bread & one's face. That voice, like bread, has its body in heaven, & I, like any face, have my celestial archetype face. My word has already been uttered by someone somewhere up above before me; my word merely follows its unattainable model. & I long to get nearer to that Unknown with song..

Signora Vitaca now looks and sees only with her voice. She is a wonder of beauty & talent on the stage. All Egyptian ships are sculpted according to the curved line of her closed eyelids, but nobody knows what she actually sings. That is how one sings about something that is more important than life, than memories, than death; that is how one sings to somebody whose gaze can renew one's life.

I know, God is inconceivable & since our beginnings has become more and more inconceivable to us. The sun appears before me as a ball of blazing darkness. But, as you say, prior to the advent of humans, this was not a trait of God's, He was not inconceivable. Because this trait of His inconceivability sprang inside us humans, not inside God, who for us changes by moving further & further away from our understanding.

On the inside cover,architect Razin had pasted a picture of a 1762 Russian samovar belonging to the Hermitage of Leningrad,& thereupon followed several excerpts in French & Russian about tea and about sitting by the samovar,taken from the works of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol,& other Russian writers. Vitaca had written in her own hand that the samovar first starts to sign in an alto,then, in descant, climbs to a tenor

..the line between light and darkness is not straight but crooked. The universe is not symmetrical. The relationship between good and evil is not symmetrical. The sum total of light in the universe is constant, & when one of the archangels and his followers fell from God & tumbled into the darkness, when he became the prince of the night, or Satan, then that sum total of light - or love, if you will - was breached.

..as he rode he thought about calligraphers who sometimes look not at the flower they are drawing, but at the emptiness that frames the flower, and see not the contours of the flower as being what they should draw, but the edges of the emptiness.
it matters what kind of emptiness is left behind by things or beings. Emptiness is really like a mold shaped by the thing that was there before, an emptiness pregnant with..

"Even this world is only Allah's first attempt", the mason thought as he left. "IF anything in this world is to be done properly, it should be done twice." He slipped off his shoes and walked under the huge dome of the Church of Wisdom.
"The question now", he said to himself, "is whether I will be buried drunk or sober..."