Shade makes colors loom and be thoughtful.
It has the afterlife atmosphere
but also the philosophic stone cool.

It is both day and night civilized,
the colour of reading, the tone
of inside, and of inside the mind.

--Les Murray, Rooms of the Sketch Garden

At a certain stage in the development of every science a degree of vagueness is what best consists with fertility.

--William James, The Principles of Psychology

“Odd, how our view of human destiny changes over the course of a lifetime. In youth we believe what the young believe, that life is all choice. We stand before a hundred doors, choose to enter one, where we’re faced with a hundred more and then choose again. We choose not just what we’ll do, but who we’ll be. Perhaps the sound of all those doors swinging shut behind us each time we select this one or that one should trouble us, but it doesn’t. Nor does the fact that the doors often are identical and even lead in some cases to the exact same place. Occasionally a door is locked, but no matter, since so many other remain available. The distinct possibility that choice itself may be an illusion is something we disregard, because we’re curious to know what’s behind that next door, the one we hope will lead us to the very heart of the mystery. Even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary we remain confident that when we emerge, with all our choosing done , we’ll have found not just our true destination but also its meaning. The young see life this way, front to back, their eyes to the telescope that anxiously scans the infinite sky and its myriad possibilities. Religion, seducing us with free will while warning us of our responsibility, reinforces youth’s need to see itself at the dramatic center, saying yes to this and no to that, against the backdrop of a great moral reckoning.

But at some point all of that changes. Doubt, born of disappointment and repetition, replaces curiosity. In our weariness we begin to sense the truth, that more doors have closed behind than remain ahead, and for the first time we’re tempted to swing the telescope around and peer at the world through the wrong end—though who can say it’s wrong? How different things look then! Larger patterns emerge, individual decisions receding into insignificance. To see a life back to front, as everyone begins to do in middle age, is to strip it of its mystery and wrap it in inevitability, drama’s enemy.”

—from Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs

"Like all art dealers, Hugh believed himself to be an integral part of the creative process. As if it would be foolish for any painter to embark on a new work without first conferring with the man who would later sell it. He didn't really want Noonan to stop painting it, of course. Though unfinished, it was still the best canvas in the room, and Hugh had to know it. Even as he suggested the painting wasn't salable, he was busy coming up with a plan to do just that. What he was really after was the story behind it. People who bought art at these prices were hungry for backstory, gossip they could repeat to their friends. Here, Hugh could explain, was one of Robert Noonan's final canvases, begun when he'd first become aware of the illness that would eventually kill him. Ka-ching!

Talk. Vital to commerce. The end of art."

--Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs

"Popular revolutionary violence was not some sort of boiling subterranean lava that finally forced its way to the onto the surface of French politics and then proceeded to scald all those who stepped in its way. Perhaps it would be better to think of the revolutionary elite as rash geologists, themselves gouging open great holes in the crust of polite discourse and then feeding the angry matter through the pipes of their rhetoric out into the open. Volcanoes and steam holes do not seem innapropriate metaphors here, because contemporaries were themselves constantly invoking them."

--Simon Schama, Citizens

"Lovers of poetry may total a million people
on the whole planet. Fewer than the players of skat."

--Les Murray, The Instrument

"The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one. I hate lies and violence in all of their forms . . . Pharisaism, dullwittedness and tyranny reign not only in merchants’ homes and police stations. I see them in science, in literature, among the younger generation. That is why I cultivate no particular predilection for policemen, butchers, scientists, writers or the younger generation. I look upon tags and labels as prejudices. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form the latter two take. Such is the program I would adhere to if I were a major artist."

--Anton Checkov, Oct. 4 1888, in a letter 

"Question. Why am I keeping this diary? Answer. Because it is part of the insane desire to perpetuate oneself. Because there seems to be a lot of things I want to say that other writers put into novels and accepted essayists into essays. Because it will be a relief to set down just what I do actually think, and in the first words to hand, instead of pondering what I ought to think and worrying about the words in which to express the hammered-out thought. But I cannot and never could invent a story, or be bothered to tell it, and have already published five books of essays, not having to do with the theater, that have been complete and utter failures. So I am driven to this last ditch of expression."

--James Agate June 3, 1932 in Ego

"Those who accuse men of always gaping after future things, and teach us to lay hold of present goods and settle ourselves in them, since we have no grip on what is to come (indeed a good deal less than we have on what is past), put their finger on the commonest of human errors--it they dare to call an error something to which Nature herself leads us in serving the continuation of her work, and which, more zealous for our action than for our knowledge, she imprints in us like many other false notions. We are never at home, we are always beyond. Fear, desire, hope, project us toward the future and steal from us the feeling and consideration of what is, to busy us with what will be, even when we shall no longer be. A soul anxious about the future is the most vulnerable [Seneca]."

--Montaigne, Essays