the moon's favors: "I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be—in a light better than any light that ever shone—in a land no one can define or remember, only desire."

2012/02/11

"I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be—in a light better than any light that ever shone—in a land no one can define or remember, only desire."

The Last Pre-Raphaelite
By Fiona MacCarthy Harvard, 629 pages, $35
review

Edward Burne-Jones

Words whisper, carrying more than one might know, hypostases, rather than mere understanding. Words grow from roots, spawn families, travel and mingle, get lost, get found, and often marry the strangest bedfellows. Like our bodies, our ideas, and our culture, words evolve, handed down to us from a place beyond memory. As the warp and woof of language, words possess the magic to shape the immaterial into the solid things of psyche ~From my intro to AO's The Archives of the Heart

The Platonic tradition may be likened to an underground river that from time to time sends up a spring; wherever its waters flow, the soul is reborn, and with it the conception of intellectual form, the beautiful, and true art.~ Kathleen Raine