A Labyrinth Is An Ancient Device That Compresses A Journey Into A Small Space, Winds Up A Path Like Thread

“A labyrinth is an ancient device that compresses a journey into a small space, winds up a path like thread on a spool. It contains beginning, confusion, perseverance, arrival, and return. There at last the metaphysical journey of your life and actual moments are one and the same. You may wander, may learn that in order to get to your destination you must turn away from it, become lost, spin about, and then only after the way has become overwhelming and absorbing, arrive, having gone the great journey without having gone far on the ground. In this it is the opposite of a maze, which has not one convoluted way but many ways and often no centre, so that wandering has no cease or at least no definitive conclusion. A maze is a conversation; a labyrinth an incantation or perhaps a prayer. In a labyrinth you’re lost in that you don’t know the twists and turns, but if you follow them you get there; and then you reverse your course. The end of the journey through the labyrinth is not at the centre, as is commonly supposed, but back at the threshold again: the beginning is also the real end. That is the home to which you return from the pilgrimage, the adventure. The unpraised edges and margins matter too, because it’s not ultimately a journey of immersion but emergence.”

— Rebecca Solnit in The Faraway Nearby

“The first declension is the first taught in nearly every Latin text. Most first declension nouns are feminine- queen (regina), woman (femina), goddess (dea), girl (puella). Only a few masculine nouns- poet (poeta), farmer (agricola), and sailor (nauta)- are included in this declension. Why would the “masculine in sense” nouns such as agricola (farmer), nauta (sailor), poeta (poet) be included in a feminine declension? … Was it perhaps because the “masculine in sense” nouns related somehow to taming nature (natura also feminine)? Most things having to do with the earth (terra, provincia) are first-declension feminine nouns, and certainly agricola and nauta are intimate with the earth. And life itself (vita) is feminine. But what does that say about the Roman view of the poet (poeta)?”

— Ann Patty, Living With a Dead Language (via provst)

Caravaggio’s angels

… but this is holy ground, you can sense it clearly. Why, it’s bursting with laurel, olives, grapes, and deep in its heart, listen… nightingales, the rustle of wings - they’re breaking into song.

Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus (trans. Fagles)

“What is it like to be a prophet? Everywhere Cassandra ran she found she was already there.”

— Anne Carson, “Cassandra Float Can” (via roofbeams)