ABANDONED
There is a strange melancholy in an abandoned home or a demolished apartment house, a melancholy that reveals the traces and scars of intimate lives to the public gaze. The tenderness of the experience results from the fact that we do not imagine the absent house, but instead the home, life, and faith of its inhabitants.
Text: Encounters by Juhani Pallasmaa.
Image: Lost Places by Sven Fennema
The melancholic..is attached less to the one they have lost than to the loss itself.
THE GODS ENVY US
They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.
photograph: Alex Lianopoulos, text: Homer, The Illiad
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the GENTLE
Ever bigger machines, entailing ever bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful.
text: by E. F. Schumacher
image: Hanwha Solar CHIP House
DESIGN PROBLEM
All the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn’t have a design problem. People do.
text: excerpt from Cradle to Cradle
image: Christian Stoll
FAILURE
Let me point out, if it has escaped your notice, that what an artist does, is fail. Any reading of literature (I mean the theory of artistic creation), however summary, will persuade you instantly that the paradigmatic artistic experience is that of failure. The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition. There is something “out there” which cannot be brought “here””. This standard. I don’t mean bad artist. I mean good artists. There is no such thing as a “successful artist” (except of course, in worldly terms).
photograph: Renato Orosco
text: Donald Barthelme, short story “The Sandman”
Boulderhouse by p-851 architecture
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All things Rotate
Whether the years of your lives are 3,000 or ten times 3,000, remember that no one loses a life other than the one he lives now, nor lives life other than the one he loses. The longest and shortest terms are thereafter the same. The present belongs to everyone. To die is to lose the present, which is only the briefest instant. The past and the future cannot be lost because that which belongs to no one cannot be taken. Remember that all things rotate, and rotate again, in the same orbit, and that for the spectator, it is the same to see them for one century, or for two, forever
text: J.L. Borges, El Tiempo Circular in Historia de la Eternidad
image: Chateau de la Rochefoucauld Stairway II by Chris Tarling
Bhavacakra: is a symbolic representation of samsara (or cyclic existence) found on the outside walls of Tibetan Buddhist temples and monasteries in the Indo-Tibet region. In the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, it is believed that the drawing was designed by the Buddha himself in order to help ordinary people understand the Buddhist teachings.
The bhavacakra is popularly referred to as the wheel of life. This term is also translated as wheel of cyclic existence or wheel of becoming.
Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.
GLIPMSES
I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding.
image: Passageway to the sea, Crete, Greece
text: Donald Miller, To Own a Dragon
rollership
