There is scarcely anything else in the world but that: to love one another.
About / My Life / Poetry I love /
“It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.”
—Don DeLillo, from White Noise (Viking, 1985)
(Source: larmoyante, via apoetreflects)
Letters from Vincent van Gogh to his brother, Theo.
Photographs of a devastated post-war Berlin in the summer of 1945.
“When Allied observers came to Germany after the war, most of them expected to find destruction on the same scale as they had witnessed in Britain during the Blitz. Even after British and American newspapers and magazines began to print pictures and descriptions of the devastation it was impossible to prepare for the sight of the real thing. Austin Robinson, for example, was sent to western Germany directly after the war on behalf of the British Ministry of Production. His description of Mainz while he was there displays his sense of shock:
That skeleton, with whole blocks level, huge areas with nothing but walls standing, factories almost completely gutted, was a picture that I know will live with me for life. One had known it intellectually without feeling it emotionally or humanly.
British Lieutenant Philip Dark was equally apallaed by the apocalyptic vision he saw in Hamburg at the end of the war:
[W]e swung in towards the centre and started to enter a city devastated beyond all comprehension. It was more than appallaing. As far as the eye could see, square mile after square mile of empty shells of buildings with twisted girders scarecrowed in the air, radiators of a flat jutting out from a shaft of a still-standing wall, like a crucified pterodactyl skeleton. Horrible, hideous shapes of chimneys sprouting from the frame of a wall. The whole pervaded by an atmosphere of ageless quiet… Such impressions are incomprehensible unless seen.
Berlin was “completely shattered - just piles of rubble and skeleton houses.” Between 18 and 20 million German people were rendered homeless by the destruction of their cities - that is the same as the combined prewar populations of Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. These people lived in cellars, ruins, holes in the ground - anywhere they could find a modicum of shelter. They were entirely deprived of essential servies, such as water, gas, electricity - as were millions of others across Europe.”
(Text via Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe; photographs via)
(via historyofeurope)
1910s Imperial Russia, Factory (textile mill, possibly), Woman for Work(?), pre WWI, Sindi, Estlyandia Gubernya (Estonia)
(I think that’s a woman there leaning against a machine)
The Old Guitarist, Pablo Picasso (1903)
I
The man bent over his guitar,
a shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
you do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
of things exactly as they are.”
Words by Marina Tsvetaeva
Translated by Ilya Shambat
English:
I like it that you’re burning not for me,
I like it that it’s not for you I’m burning
And that the heavy sphere of Planet Earth
Will underneath our feet no more be turning
I like it that I can be unabashed
And humorous and not to play with words
And not to redden with a smothering wave
When with my sleeves I’m lightly touching yours.With this my heart and this my hand I thank
You that - although you don’t know it -
You love me thus; and for my peaceful nights
And for rare meetings in the hour of sunset,
That we aren’t walking underneath the moon,
That sun is not above our heads this morning,
That you - alas - are burning not for me
And that - alas - it’s not for you I’m burning.Russian:
Мне нравится, что вы больны не мной,
Мне нравится, что я больна не вами,
Что никогда тяжелый шар земной
Не уплывет под нашими ногами.
Мне нравится, что можно быть смешной -
Распущенной - и не играть словами,
И не краснеть удушливой волной,
Слегка соприкоснувшись рукавами.Спасибо вам и сердцем и рукой
За то, что вы меня - не зная сами! -
Так любите: за мой ночной покой,
За редкость встреч закатными часами,
За наши не-гулянья под луной,
За солнце, не у нас над головами, -
За то, что вы больны - увы! - не мной,
За то, что я больна - увы! - не вами!
(via faber-niet)
The Petrograd Soviet Assembly meeting, 1917
The Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was a city council of Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), the capital of the Russian Empire. For brevity it is usually called the Petrograd Soviet. During the revolutionary days the council tried to extend its jurisdiction nationwide as a rival power center to the Provisional Government creating what in the Soviet historiography is known as the Dvoevlastie (Dual power). Its committees became key components during the Russian Revolution leading up to the armed revolt of October Revolution.
(via sovietsky)
(Source: chandr-a, via thestillwaters)
“Portrait of Princess Tatiana Alexandrovna Yusupova” (detail) (1858) by Franz Xavier Winterhalter (1805-1873).
