Shovel in Hand

Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other Who think the same thoughts without need of speech, And babble the same speech without need of meaning.

Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless…

“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”

Because each work of art originates in the mind and feelings of a human being, it reaches its destination in the mind and feelings of another. A work of art, therefore, is a fact of consciousness quite as much as it an object existing beside us in the physical world and an event in the chronology of the historical past. A history of art is therefore a history of consciousness, and a history of modern art is uniquely a history of self-consciousness […]