Category: Posts
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The Ideal City of Baltimore
If you enter the Walters Art Gallery by its old entrance, climb the marble staircase, jump over a stanchion, and go past a minor Raphael, you will come across a utopian vision of a city. Because of where it is now hung, the painting is known as The Ideal City of Baltimore. The landscape, painted…
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Dao dejing XLI: Translation and Commentary
上士聞道，勤而行之；中士聞道，若存若亡；下士聞道，大笑之。不笑不足以為道。故建言有之：明道若昧；進道若退；夷道若纇；上德若谷；太白若辱；廣德若不足；建德若偷；質真若渝；大方無隅；大器晚成；大音希聲；大象無形；道隱無名。夫唯道，善貸且成。 When the highest man hears about the Way, he makes it his endeavor and pursues it.The mediocre man hears about it, he now seems a true follower! … he now seems to flee.And the lowest man? He laughs at the Way with glee. But suppressing laughter suppresses Speechso these dictums were established to grasp…
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On Seeing the Divine
Vision in the Iliad’s Deathless Prosopopoeia Josef Albers, Tlaloc Laudato sie, mi Signore cum tucte le Tue creature, spetialmente messor lo frate Sole,lo qual è iorno, et allumini noi per lui.Et ellu è bellu e radiante cum grande splendore: de Te, Altissimo, porta significatione. — Francis of Assisi, from the Canticle of the Sun Before…
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Painting’s Liberation From Perspective
Keine Ferne macht dich schwierig,Kommst geflogen und gebannt No distance makes you difficult,You come flying, and stay under a spell —Goethe Laura Owens, Untitled, 2013 Years ago, when I was teaching myself about art, I came across a curious exhibit at the MoMA: The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World. This exhibit gathered…
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A Tenuous Account of Apollo
0. Apollo is inscrutable. I’m at first unable to even roughly sketch his domain, in the way I can for Aphrodite (love) or Poseidon (the sea). But one of his Homeric hymns has the faintest whiff of answers. 1. First let’s delineate the scope of the hymns, so that my bout of logorrhea stains only…
Essays 