Some people are as frustrated as a three-headed woodpecker in a petrified forest.

T.F. Tenney

'Fireflies at Uji River'. Tokuriki Tomikichiro. 1902-1999.

Biblia pauperum. c. 1462.

Maria Brzozowska.

Jeff Christensen.

All at once he found his mind drawing a parallel between that destiny and his own existence; all at once questions of life arose before his vision, like owls in an ancient ruin flushed from sleep by a stray ray of sunlight. Somehow he felt pained and grieved at his arrested development, at the check which had taken place in his moral growth, at the weight which appeared to be pressing upon his every faculty. Also gnawing at his heart there was a sense of envy that others should be living a life so full and free, while all the time the narrow, pitiful little pathway of his own existence was being blocked by a great boulder. And in his hesitating soul there arose a torturing consciousness that many sides of his nature had never yet been stirred, that others had never even been touched, and that not one of them had attained complete formation. Yet with this there went an aching suspicion that, buried in his being, as in a tomb, there still remained a moribund element of sweetness and light, and that it was an element which, though hidden in his personality, as a nugget lies lurking in the bowels of the earth, might once have become minted into sterling coin. But the treasure was now overlaid with rubbish--was now thickly littered over with dust. 'Twas as though some one had stolen from him, and besmirched, the store of gifts with which life and the world had dowered him; so that always he would be prevented from entering life's field and sailing across it with the aid of intellect and of will.

Yes, at the very start a secret enemy had laid a heavy hand upon him and diverted him from the road of human destiny. And now he seemed to be powerless to leave the swamps and wilds in favour of that road.

All around him was a forest, and ever the recesses of his soul were growing dimmer and darker, and the path more and more tangled, while the consciousness of his condition kept awaking within him less and

less frequently--to arouse only for a fleeting moment his slumbering faculties. Brain and volition alike had become paralysed, and, to all appearances, irrevocably--the events of his life had become whittled

down to microscopical proportions. Yet even with them he was powerless to cope--he was powerless to pass from one of them to another. Consequently they bandied him to and fro like the waves of the ocean. Never was he able to oppose to any event elasticity of will; never was he able to conceive, as the result of any event, a reasoned-out impulse. Yet to confess this, even to himself, always cost him a bitter pang: his fruitless regrets for lost opportunities, coupled with burning reproaches of conscience, always pricked him like needles, and led him to strive to put away such reproaches and to discover a scapegoat.

Ivan Goncharov

Oblomov

I applaud the courage of he who accepts each and every one of the laws of a game he did not invent and was not asked if he wanted to play.

Juan Carlos Onetti

The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.

Thornton Wilder

So here we are once more in the wilds, and once more we’ve come upon some out of the way corner. But what a wilderness, and what an out of the way corner!

Nikolai Gogol

Image: Carpathian Mountains

Everywhere across whatever sorrows of which our life is woven, some radiant joy will gaily flash past.

Nikolai Gogol

The kingdom of heaven and the hope of glory are within. They lurk within the unfathomed depths of consciousness. Divinity lies buried under the heavier motions of the sensual nature and the incessant scurrying of the superficial mind.

Alvin Boyd Kuhn

Kaoru Yamada.

'The Man nobody knows'. Paul Horton.

Kongo Peoples, Yombe Group - Power Figure (Nkisi N'Kondi: Mangaaka). 19th century.

Found at a Bronze Age burial site, this gold lozenge was buried with its owner, thought to have fastened his cloak. It is about 4,000 years old (?) and displayed in the Wiltshire Museum, Devizes.

"And the LORD said, 'My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh; yet his days shall be one hundred and twenty years'."

Genesis 6:3