observation

The Importance of Keeping a Journal: Anaïs Nin

Aside | | Paul Greer


Anais Nin

reblogging amandaonwriting:

“This diary is my kief, hashish, and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice. Instead of writing a novel, I lie back with this book and a pen, and dream, and indulge in refractions and defractions… I must relive my life in the dream. The dream is my only life. I see in the echoes and reverberations, the transfigurations which alone keep wonder pure. Otherwise all magic is lost. Otherwise life shows its deformities and the homeliness becomes rust… All matter must be fused this way through the lens of my vice or the rust of living would slow down my rhythm to a sob.”
~From The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 1.

“The diary taught me that it is in the moments of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately. I learned to choose the heightened moments because they are the moments of revelation.”
~From Nin’s essay On Writing, 1947.

From Flavorwire

monsieur rené magritte, interview

Video | | Paul Greer

via thenearsightedmonkey

Beinvenue yourself on down the rickety stairs to the Near Sighted Monkey Lounge where we are watching a film interview in French. It doesn’t matter if you understand it or not because no matter what it sounds good playing in the background and it features Monsieur Magritte speaking about mystery:

“Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.”

Sketches of the moon from Galileo’s “Sidereus Nuncius,”

Image | | Paul Greer


Sidereus Nuncius

 

“The Latin word nuncius was typically used during this time period to denote messenger; however, it was also (though less frequently) rendered as message. Though the title Sidereus Nuncius is usually translated into English as Sidereal Messenger, many of Galileo’s early drafts of the book and later related writings indicate that the intended purpose of the book was “simply to report the news about recent developments in astronomy, not to pass himself off solemnly as an ambassador from heaven.”Therefore, the correct English translation of the title is Sidereal Message (or often, Starry Message).”

via nearsightedmonkey