It’s incredible to imagine a painter covering the entire surface of this canvas with their thought and attention. And it’s incredible to see photos of this painter, Joaquin Sorolla, working on location, in the open air, with brushes that look like javelins, on canvases that resemble billboards. I don’t know how much of Before the Bullfight was painted outside, but the painting has both the fresh spontaneity of a plein air work, and the considered compositional architecture of a well-planned studio piece. Sorolla is somehow able to have it both ways.
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MacDonald on Life and Law
Life and law cannot be so at variance that perfection must be gained by thwarting development!
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Annie Dillard on Ascending the Hill of the Lord
Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead — as if innocence had ever been — and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled…
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Jennifer Newsome Martin on Culture
That the word “culture” is related to the Latin word for “cultivation,” for “tending”—like a gardener cultivates soil by supplying it with necessary nutrients, amending it with natural fertilizers, or removing weeds—signifies that culture does not merely indicate high-level products or content which emerge from any given society, but is in fact the very living substratum from which these products emerge.
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Simone Weil on Force and Deformity
The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad, is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.
