Notæ

On Van Gogh, Swifts and Stones

“Plato Was Right – Earth Is Made, on Average, of Cubes,” in SciTech Daily

“The interesting thing here is that what we find with rock, or earth, is that there is more than a conceptual lineage back to Plato. It turns out that Plato’s conception about the element earth being made up of cubes is, literally, the statistical average model for real earth. And that is just mind-blowing.”

“Moscow to Vladivostok: 9288 km, 28 Days, 38 Encounters,” Mesto47.org

“Do you talk to the person sitting next to you on public transport? Maybe not on a five minute bus ride, but what if it takes 50 minutes? Or 50 hours? We set out on a journey on the Transsiberian railway, talking to the people we met along the way. This is more than a journey of self discovery. It is an exploration of both vast and confined spaces. The overwhelmingly big size of the Russian Federation, and the cramped and packed train carriages. A country that for insiders is the motherland so big, they only discovered their own back yard. For the stranger a mystery, that is so much more than just political headlines.”

“The Mysterious Life of Birds Who Never Come Down,” by Helen Macdonald in the New York Times Magazine

“One of the ironies of the current situation is we’ve discovered through the threat of the virus that we are inextricably interrelated, and the means to deal with the virus requires, ironically, the naming of a social gesture that embodies a kind of loneliness.”

“How an Old Postcard Led Art Historians to the Spot Where a Distraught Van Gogh Made His Final Painting,” by Sarah Cascone for ArtNet News

“Every element of this mysterious painting can be explained by observation of the postcard and the location: The shape of the hillside, the roots, their relation to each other, the composition of the earth and the presence of a steep limestone face.”


Want to read beyond the articles? Follow the links below!

  • Plato’s Timaeus (“To earth, then, let us assign the cubical form; for earth is the most immoveable of the four and the most plastic of all bodies, and that which has the most stable bases must of necessity be of such a nature.”)
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