christophrawr[.]
(Source: dulceaturdimiento, via beatastic)
“I don’t know why we long so for permanence, why the fleeting nature of things so disturbs. With futility, we cling to the old wallet long after it has fallen apart. We visit and revisit the old neighborhood where we grew up, searching for the remembered grove of trees and the little fence. We clutch our old photographs. In our churches and synagogues and mosques, we pray to the everlasting and eternal. Yet, in every nook and cranny, nature screams at the top of her lungs that nothing lasts, that it is all passing away. All that we see around us, including our own bodies, is shifting and evaporating and one day will be gone. Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?”
Alan Lightman, MIT’s first professor with dual appointments in science and the humanities and author of the immeasurably brilliant The Accidental Universe, considers our longing for permanence in a fleeting universe, something a different Alan – Watts – contemplated with equal, timeless poignancy half a century ago.
More of Lightman’s singular mind and spirit here.
(via explore-blog)
(Source: explore-blog, via explore-blog)
prescient.
(Source: hommism, via ineedmoreties)
Paul Klee, Zwillinge, 1930
Klee suffered from a wasting disease, scleroderma, toward the end of his life, enduring pain that seems to be reflected in his last works of art. One of his last paintings, Death and Fire, features a skull in the centre with the German word for death, “Tod”, appearing in the face. He died in Muralto, Locarno, Switzerland, on 29 June 1940 without having obtained Swiss citizenship, despite his birth in that country. His art work was considered too revolutionary, even degenerate, by the Swiss authorities, but eventually they accepted his request six days after his death. His legacy comprises about 9,000 works of art. The words on his tombstone, Klee’s credo, placed there by his son Felix, say, “I cannot be grasped in the here and now, For my dwelling place is as much among the dead, As the yet unborn, Slightly closer to the heart of creation than usual, But still not close enough.” He was buried at Schosshaldenfriedhof, Bern, Switzerland.
(Source: emigrejukebox, via marques-de-dali-de-pubol)
