Detail Of Caravaggios Judith Beheading Holofernes (c. 1607)

Detail of Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes (c. 1607)

“Every single thing becomes a word in a language that Someone or Something, night and day, writes down in a never-ending scribble, which is the history of the world, embracing. Rome, Carthage, you, me, everyone, my life, which I do not understand, this anguish of being enigma, accident, and puzzle, and all the discordant languages of Babel. Behind each name lies that which has no name. Today I feel its nameless shadow tremble in the blue clarity of the compass needle, whose rule extends as far as the far seas, something like a clock glimpsed in a dream or a bird that stirs suddenly in its sleep.”

— Jorge Luis Borges: A Compass.

Two Afghan women clad in burqas whisper in a shop in Kabul, 2007. Despite advances in women’s rights since the fall of the Taliban, most Afghan women, especially outside the capital, still opt for the all-enveloping cloak. (via How A Female Photographer Sees Her Afghanistan : The Picture Show : NPR)

“She was like a woman of Leonardo da Vinci, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things that she will not tell us.”

— E.M. Forster | A Room With a View

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001)