About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
-W.H. Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts"
About suffering they were never wrong ... Terry Teachout had been thinking about this poem
Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Erotic eBook Eros: Deer in the Headlights
Being a Slav slave looks good on my resume, asserts Hugh.
There's more to life than books you know, but not much more
Naughty, but nice Victorian Casanovas choose Top 100 Books Heading the pack is the greatest aphrodisiac of them all - Lord of the Rings
• Troubled Waters Hitting on all Cylinders [Passing through the cast-iron gates is like walking into a Jane Austen novel Why women love Jane Austen ; Research finds men and women differ in how they decide which strangers they can trust Men are less socially oriented ; Kiss Your Privacy Goodbye Tell us which ad is most powerful - and help us reform the Patriot Act ]
• · Same-sex marriage - first Canadian and then Spanish legislators voted to legalize the practice The Heterosexual Revolution ; Religion tends to draw certain extreme people, which can be very good material for humour Why are religious jokes so funny?
• · · A Bullfighter's Guide - Why Business People Speak Like Idiots Adding value in language capability ; (second post) - Slavoj Zizek listens to Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" and detects certain ironies ; After mentioning a few newly discovered author blogs yesterday, I got tips about a few more that promptly got added to the sidebar. First, I can't believe I haven't put Damian McNicholl on the list before now, considering how many times he's appeared here in the past. That oversight's certainly rectified, and right now you can read his friendly email chat with Author2Author: Tom Morris and Kevin Guilfoile other Friends of Beatrice Until Then, They Almost All Have Blogs...
• · · · Differences between Moscow and St. Petersburg have been piling up for more than three centuries Language has been no exception to this process ; The New York Times’s hip and ambitious coverage of pop culture manages to miss half the story Off Course ; Through Hamlet to Narrative Medicine and Neuroscience: Literature as a Basic Science of Psychiatry Why does Hamlet delay his revenge?
• · · · · On class acts at the Times and Journal: The tale of two series Class Matters ; Are Genius and Madness Related?
• · · · · · Can Sun Tzu make you successful? Reading "The Art of War" ; A perfect story must be just-so from the opening sentence, taking readers into another world, as happens here: I will try to be your eyes, Jorge. I am following the advice you gave me when we said goodbye: 'Write, and you will remember.' I will try to remember, with more exactitude this time, so that you can see what I see, so that you can unveil the mystery and arrive at the truth. We always write in order to remember the truth. When we invent, it is only in order to remember the truth more exactly - Old Modern Masters Warhol ; Rothko ; Picasso ; Kandinsky ; Ansel Adams ; O'Keeffe ; Klimt ; Michelangelo ; Monet ; Turner ; Van Gogh