Maria Callas- Pace, Pace Mio Dio!

Maria Callas- Pace, Pace mio dio!

(la forza del destino, verdi)

“Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life. All it needs from you is that you take care not to trample on it.”

— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, 2004

““I love words,” I tell you, but it’s not quite as simple as that. Sometimes, my body does not feel like a body, but feels like a collection of words in a glass jar, feels like quotes trapped beneath the surface of a pond. Braided into my hair, you found the Latin phrases that had stuck to my tongue since childhood, but never left it. Tempus fugit written on every inch that had grown until my hair fell to my waist. I cut my hair, but the next year, I started learning the language. The roots now brush the back of my neck, I stumble over saying the hard ‘C’ in orbis non sufficit and I wonder if the empire of Alexander the Great was created from the same feeling I currently have. Cut me open and find Shakespeare etched onto my bones. Find the snake twining around my ribs beneath the flowers of my skin. Find the devils here on my shoulder, and their nails dragging down the empty expanse of my back. Find the water that drowned Ophelia rising on my cheeks and the realisation that I do not like the comedies. You dig deeper, but you’re driven off course, time and time again. I want to find out what sort of hero you are: Homeric / Roman / Pyrrhic. Every time my fingers twitch, a tiny tremor is sent through the city of Troy. One day, it will come crashing down but I can’t stop my hands from moving. Kiss me and you hear Plath, a mad girl’s love song that sounds like a siren call. Bite my lip hard enough and you taste Siken in the blood in your mouth. Place your hand against my heart and there you find Yeats. My chest collapses into a gyre beneath your touch and you pull away from my body that is not a body. So when I say “I love words,” as an explanation, it’s the only thing I can tell you because I cannot expect you to understand, and it’s the only thing you will.”

— Madeleine C, Quotations

Simone Weil, “Void and Compensation”, Simone Weil: An Anthology

[Text ID: “The tendency to spread evil beyond oneself: I still have it! Beings and things are not sacred enough to me. May I never sully anything, even though I be utterly transformed into mud.To sully nothing, even in thought. Even in my worst moments I would not destroy a Greek statue or a fresco by Giotto. Why anything else then? Why, for example, a moment in the life of a human being who could have been happy for that moment.”]

Francesco Hayez, The Kiss, 1859

“A merely beautiful object gives us pleasure but perhaps little more; it is unlikely to exhilarate in the same way as the Sublime. When we look at a beautiful statue, piece of furniture, face or flower, we probably feel a satisfaction that everything is perfectly as it should be, and unquestionably in the right place. There is a sort of appropriation that happens – we might wish to possess the thing in some way, to line it up on a shelf, to display it for guests or for ourselves to marvel at. There is also, in most beautiful things, a lingering sense of transience, of finitude. A flower will die, the chair will break, and that beautiful person will wither and pass. We might say that beauty in its most striking forms seems to ache; it is often tinged with the sadness of a fleeting moment that will never occur again. The Sublime, on the other hand, seems to appropriate us, and its relationship to death is more explicit. We are beholding something frightening – kept safe by that all-important distance – which, if circumstances were different, might well be an agent of destruction.”

— Derren Brown, A Book of Secrets: Finding Solace in a Stubborn World (via luxe-pauvre)