Photograph: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

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“You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

[…]

“I don’t mean it’s easy or assured; there are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet. But there is, also, the summoning world, the admirable energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe — that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.

[…]

“And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold — but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy — and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrug carelessly over the fate of any individual that they may, the better, keep the Niles and the Amazons flowing. And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And can do what I want to with it. Live it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes.”

—Mary Oliver, “Staying Alive”

h/t The Marginalian

[via Follies Of God]

Violeta Lopiz | Marginalinian

Arthur Rackham (British, 1867-1939) • Illustration for The Wishing-Table by The Brothers Grimm • From the collection Little Brother & Little Sister and other Tales of the Brothers Grimm • Pen and ink with watercolour • 1917 • Publisher: Constable & Co. Ltd, London

Wishing-Table, Gold-Ass, and Cudgel: “Gold pieces fell down on the cloth like a thunder shower.”

A beautiful review of the collection Little Brother & Little Sister, written by Maria Popova can be read on her online magazine The Marginalian.

M.C. Escher on Loneliness, Creativity, and How Rachel Carson [born #OTD] Inspired His Art, with a Side of Bach:

The above article mentions that Rachel Carson owned two signed prints by M.C. Escher; it's been noted elsewhere that one was Fish and Frogs (1949), but does anyone know what the second one was?

It is false to say that frontiers do not exist. They do exist, temporarily. But at the same time there exists a force of creativity and truth uniting us all, in humility and in pride at the same time.

Albert Camus, in a letter to Boris Pasternak

Alice James - genius

"I am convinced that most people do not grow up. We find parking spaces and honor our credit cards. We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias. We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do."

Letter to My Daughter is a superb read in its entirety. 

- d.h. lawrence

So much of the beauty, so much of what propels our pursuit of truth, stems from the invisible connections—between ideas, between disciplines, between the denizens of a particular time and a particular place, between the interior world of each pioneer and the mark they leave on the cave walls of culture, between faint figures who pass each other in the nocturne before the torchlight of a revolution lights the new day, with little more than a half-nod of kinship and a match to change hands.

– Maria Popova, Figuring

Love is a giver and a plunderer, the way it both anneals the self and alters it, the way it moors our wholeness and maps our incompleteness. At its heart is the ecstatic, disorienting recognition that our world is unfinished, that by entering the world of the other we broaden and magnify our own, that in the end there is no world — only a flowing exchange of energy, through which we become more entirely ourselves.

William Blake died on this day in 1827, to be buried in an unmarked grave at a pauper's funeral, having given us some of humanity's most transcendent art and poetry.

[...]

Those who knew William Blake (November 28, 1757–August 12, 1827) cherished his overwhelming kindness, his capacity for delight even during his frequent and fathomless depressions, his “expression of great sweetness, but bordering on weakness — except when his features are animated by expression, and then he has an air of inspiration about him.” He was remembered for the strange, koan-like things he said about Jesus (He is the only God. And so am I and so are you.), about the prosperous artists who held his poverty as proof of his failure (I possess my visions and peace. They have bartered their birthright for a mess of pottage.), about the nature of creativity (The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees.)

[The Marginalian]

Ben Shahn | The Marginalian

- Marcus Aurelius

Screenshot from The Marginalian by Maria Popova

#Superb_Owl Sunday article/photo gallery: "Gorgeous 19th-Century Illustrations of Owls and Ospreys" via The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings)

aRt ♡

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