totality of existence

14

Simone Leuck - Cuba TV Series

17 SEP 2026

“Poetry’s impulse to use metaphor, to discover resemblance, is not to make comparisons . . . it is to discover those correspondences of which the sum total would be proof of the indivisible totality of existence.”

—John Berger
from “Dream,” in And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, 1982

monks head

13

Wooden sculpture of a monk's head bearing an inscription on the interior, Japan, 1328 from Sign, Image, Symbol (ed. George Kepes)

17 SEP 2026

“One of the most mysterious of semi-speculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind’s imagining into another.”

—John Keats
from his marginalia in Paradise Lost

a dry psyche

12

attribution unknown

16 SEP 2026

Heraclitus
(translated by Guy Davenport)

“The stuff of the psyche is a smoke-like substance of fine particles that give rise to all other things, particles of less mass than any other substance and constantly in motion . . . The psyche rises as a mist from things that are wet. . . . A dry psyche is most skilled in intelligence and is brightest in virtue. . . . A drunk man, staggering and mindless, must be led home by his son, so wet is his psyche.”

love

11

Flannery O'Connor as a girl, reading
via the Ina Dillard Russell Library
Georgia College & State University

16 SEP 2026

"To begin with, let us take the following motto. . . Literature is love. Now we can continue."

—Vladimir Nabokov
from Despair

glass of water

10

Hannah Hoch – Der Kleine P (Little P)

29 AUG 2026

“There’s only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that’s a writer sitting down to write.”

 —Mignon McLaughlin
author of 3 volumes of neurotic aphorisms

original context unclear 

reality intolerance

09

08 AUG 2026

“No artist tolerates reality.”

photographer unknown

—Friedrich Nietzsche
(paraphrased)

a wise reader

08

Lucien Freud
The Artist's Mother Reading, 1975

21 JUL 2026

“A wise reader reads . . . not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine.”

—Vladimir Nabokov
from “Good Readers and Good Writers”

critical judement as art

07

Eliseo Mattiacci - To think the thought (1973)

20 JUN 2026

“A critical judgement of an artistic production has no civil rights in the realm of art if it isn't itself a work of art, either in its substance, as a representation of a necessary impression in the state of becoming, or in the beauty of its form and open tone...”

—Friedrich Schlegel
from "Critical Fragments" (no.117)

truth takes too long

06

Daido Moriyama - Memory, 2012

06 MAY 2026

“You can't tell everyone the truth all the time, and you certainly can't tell anyone the whole truth, ever, because it would take too long.”

—Lydia Davis
from "Our Trip"

art makes us see

05

Rudy Burckhardt, A View From Brooklyn II, 1954 (detail)

11 APR 2026

“Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see.”

—widely attributed to Paul Klee
original context unclear

unfinished and unstrong

04

One of a series of photographs of the astronaut John Glenn taken by an automatic sequence motion picture camera during his flight on "Friendship 7." Glenn was in a state of weightlessness, traveling at 17,500 mph.

03 MAR 2026

“Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and hence also what is most unfinished and unstrong.”

—Friedrich Nietsche
from The Gay Science

the day you catch an idea

03

From LIFE magazine
photographer unknown

14 FEB 2025

“The day you catch an idea you fall in love with, even a small one, is a beautiful day.”

—widely attributed to David Lynch
original context unclear