like every collection, this one is a diary

I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.

When they observed the world, the world observed them back. If for example, they travelled in a boat on a river, then the river was in some way aware of carrying them on its back and had in fact agreed to it. When they looked up to the stars, the constellations were not simply patterns enabling them to organise what they saw, they were vehicles of meaning, a never-ending flow of information. The world was constantly speaking…

No, I could not abandon my heart, I told myself. However heavy or, at times, dark it might be, it could sometimes dance through the wind like a bird or see through all eternity.

peril, strangely encountered, strangely endured, marks us;

Too many visitors think of the Met as a museum of Art History, where the objective is to learn about art rather than from it. Too many suppose there are experts who know all the right answers and it isn't a layman's place to dig into objects and extract what meaning they can. The more time I spend in the Met, the more convinced I am it isn't a museum of art history, not principally. Its interests reach up to the heavens and down into worm-ridden tombs and touch on virtually every aspect of how it feels and what it means to live in the space between. There aren't experts about that. I believe we take art seriously when we try to discern what, at close quarters, it reveals.

From his earliest years Cincinnatus, by some strange and happy chance comprehending his danger, carefully managed to conceal a certain peculiarity. He was impervious to the rays of others, and therefore produced when off his guard a bizarre impression, as of a lone dark obstacle in this world of souls transparent to one another; he learned however to feign translucence, employing a complex system of optical illusions, as it were—but he had only to forget himself, to allow a momentary lapse in self control, in the manipulation of cunningly illuminated facets and angles at which he turned his soul, and immediately there was alarm. In the midst of the excitement of a game his coevals would suddenly forsake him, as if they had sensed that his lucid gaze and the azure of his temples were but a crafty deception and that actually Cincinnatus was opaque. Sometimes, in the midst of a sudden silence, the teacher, in chagrined perplexity, would gather up all the reserves of skin around his eyes, gaze at him for a long while, and finally say: "What is wrong with you, Cincinnatus?" Then Cincinnatus would take hold of himself, and, clutching his own self to his breast, would remove that self to a safe place.

I missed him a lot, but I never said so out loud. Secretly, I called him my Persephone. How can I get you out of hell? I can't, I am one of the mistresses of hell, but hell has its corners, and we can rule there, rule and disobey.

"…the labyrinth plays tricks on the mind. It makes people forget things. If you're not careful it can unpick your entire personality."

For me, the other place is a neighboring country. As in fantasy literature, it's a world that touches ours, is superimposed onto it, a kind of fourth dimension. Once you're cast into it, you can never get out; just one looming shadow and you're dragged back there, it's beyond you to resist. [...] We can learn how to live with the knowledge that that world is always there, that it will always be there, just out of sight. It is a world in which victim and abuser are reunited. I think they are the same, or almost the same shadows. It's a world where it's impossible to be ignorant of evil. It's everywhere, altering the color and flavor of everything. Ignoring or forgetting it is not an option, for the more you run from it, the quicker it catches you up. But it is possible to stand back from the brink. That is the challenge: how to remain on the threshold of this world, how to keep going like tightrope walkers along the wire, facing the future. Wavering, unsteady, but not falling. Not falling. Not falling.

I have always wondered whether everyone’s interior life is as exhaustingly complicated as mine, if everyone is placed, like a white mouse, in the middle of their labyrinthine mind, through which they have to find a path, just one, the true one, while all the others lead to traps with no escape.

The room was burdened with the feelings evoked by night, when fears seep through decrepit walls and unhappiness turns sweet, when the soul proudly beats its wings over sleeping humanity.