Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.
Wanderlust in a Laos village…
If you like to have things easy,
you’ll have difficulties;
if you like problems,
you will succeed.
Laotian Proverb
Wanderlust in a Cambodia market on a floating village…
I felt as if I were in an exiled and floating world, isolated from all necessities of life except the one of buying things.
The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
Alan W. Watts
Kiyomizu-dera, Buddhist temple in eastern Kyoto, founded in 778 (early Heian period) by Sakanoue no Tamuramaro, and the present buildings were constructed in 1633, ordered by the Tokugawa Iemitsu. Not one nail is used in the entire structure. The temple takes its name from the waterfall (Otowa waterfall: where three channels of water fall into a pond) within the complex, which runs off the nearby hills. Visitors can catch and drink the water, which is believed to have wish granting powers. Kiyomizu means clear water, or pure water.
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms
Site Specific Art at The Avignon Theatre Festival (Festival d’Avignon).
I ride earth’s burning carousel.
Day in, day out.
Sylvia Plath
Butoh dances on the streets of Avignon during the festival…
My profession is the business of human rehabilitation, which goes today by the name of dancer… All the power of civilized morality, hand in hand with the capitalist economic system and its political institutions, is utterly opposed to using the body simply for the purpose, means, or tool of pleasure. Still more, to a production-oriented society, the aimless use of the body, which I call dance, is a deadly enemy which must be taboo.
Tatsumi Hijikata (founder of a genre of dance performance art called Butoh)
Timeless Capitalism: Avignon Theatre Festival, 2005
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty?
Down and Out in Paris and London
Victor
Where did you spend the last one?
Amanda
(warmingly)
Victor.
Victor
I want to know.
Amanda
St. Moritz. It was very attractive.
Victor
I hate St. Mortiz.
Amanda
So do I.
Noël Coward, Private Lives
We are a free people; and now you have planted in our country the title deeds of our future slavery. You are neither god nor demon; who are you, then, to make slaves? Orou! You understand the language of these men, tell us all, as you have told me, what they have written on this sheet of metal: This country is ours. This country yours? And why? Because you have walked thereon? If a Tahitian landed one day on your shores, and scratched on one of your rocks or on the bark of your trees: This country belongs to the people of Tahiti – what would you think?
Denis Diderot
Wanderlust in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague.
I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more
Franz Kafka, The Castle (1926)
Prague, Czech Republic
Wanderlust in the Alps, Switzerland (Of course I may have been in France on this trail).
Yet there was a momentary hint of blue sky, and even this bit of light was enough to release a flash of diamonds across the wide landscape, so oddly disfigured by its snowy adventure. Usually the snow stopped at that hour of the day, as if for a quick survey of what had been achieved thus far; the rare days of sunshine seemed to serve much the same purpose—the flurries died down and the sun’s direct glare attempted to melt the luscious, pure surface of drifted new snow. It was a fairy-tale world, child-like and funny. Boughs of trees adorned with thick pillows, so fluffy someone must have plumped them up; the ground a series of humps and mounds, beneath which slinking underbrush or outcrops of rock lay hidden; a landscape of crouching, cowering gnomes in droll disguises—it was comic to behold, straight out of a book of fairy tales. But if there was something roguish and fantastic about the immediate vicinity through which you laboriously made your way, the towering statues of snow-clad Alps, gazing down from the distance, awakened in you feelings of the sublime and holy.
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Solipsism with on the Mabou Mines Brazil Tour of Gospel at Colonus and Hajj.
When we love, we always strive to become better than we are.
When we strive to become better than we are,
everything around us becomes better too.
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Psychedelic Art: Bill Ham inventor of the Light Show.
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a weary world.
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
Wanderlust on a Moscow Street…
On our Earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise, and we know of no other sort of love. I want suffering in order to love. I long, I thirst, this very instant, to kiss with tears the earth that I have left, and I don’t want, I won’t accept life on any other!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877)
