sorry for the disturbance.

the Spanish original text reads, “Recuerdo que los escuché decir «máscara», no «cáscara». La casa es una máscara, escuché.” if we were to translate this literally, it would translate as “I remember I heard them say ‘mask’ not ‘shell’. The house is a mask, I heard.” 

but McDowell doesn’t translate it literally. why not? the cadence of a language is often lost in translation, but this cadence needs to be preserved. máscara and cáscara rhyme in Spanish, but mask and shell do not.

the word hell comes into English from Proto-Germanic *haljō, meaning ‘the underworld’. and *haljō, in turn, comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *kel, meaning ‘to hide’. (the word occult shares this root). the word hell literally means the hidden place. and what is the task of a mask? the task of a mask is to hide. to cover it. it could also be said that this is the task of hell; to conceal the dead from the living, the damned from the saved.

“According to Simberg, the flowers represent people’s souls, the skeletons are aids to Death, and the Garden of Death is a purgatory of sorts for souls waiting for entrance into heaven. This artwork invites the viewer to consider the afterlife, to take comfort in his or her own passing, and to not fear what happens after the body fails to function.”

“It depicts Simberg’s thoughts on afterlife, which is not run by angels but skeletons who take care of the heavenly garden with a gentle hand, while waiting for more “gardeners” to arrive. It is derived from the medieval belief that the dead sleep in a blooming garden.”

Tom Payne for Sharp Magazine

Hi! I couldn’t choose which screencap to use so I made you two icons! I hope you like them :)

“Our secrecy is our survival. Our survival is our strength.”