Jeff Wall, Passerby

Nacht und Träume by Schubert. Sung by Nicolai Gedda in 1961.

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‘You must recognise that God is so unlike whatever can be thought or pictured, that, when you have got beyond the stage of self-­indulgent religiosity there will be nothing you can securely know or feel. You face a blank: and any attempt to avoid that or shy away from it is a return to playing comfortable religious games. The dark night is God’s attack on religion.’

Rowan Williams, Open to Judgment

Giotto, The Ascension

Neither reading nor writing, nor speaking-and yet it is by those paths that we escape what has been said already, and knowledge, and reciprocity, and enter the unknown space, the space of distress where what is given is perhaps not received by anyone. Generosity of the disaster. There death, and life are always surpassed.

— Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

Kafka manuscript. First page of In the Cathedral from The Trial. Not burned. (source:www.kafka.org)

“Dearest Max, My last request: Everything I leave behind me to be burned unread.” 

Kafka letter to friend Max Brod

Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake. What an experience.

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“Take God out of the dictionary, and you would have him in the street.”

Herman Melville letter

Atget

Everyday I calls a phone to her…

Lee Friedlander

St James, by the greek

Dürer

heracliteanfire:

Photograph depicting inscriptions carved by prisoners in the Beauchamp Tower, Tower of London, by Sir Benjamin Stone, 1898 (via Victoria & Albert Museum)