Yeaux Leaux

Martian landscape. The images is taken in Feb 2017 246 km above the surface of Mars. Credit: NASA, MRO, HiRISE. by MistWeaver80

Vikram Kushwah

Nineteen forty-six was a good time—perhaps the best time—in the twentieth century. The war was over, the Depression had ended, and everyone was rediscovering the simple pleasures. A war is like an illness and when it’s over you think you’ve never felt so well. There’s a terrific sense of coming back, of repossessing your life.

New York City had never been so attractive. The postwar years were like a great smile in its sullen history. The village was as close in 1946 as it would come to Paris in the twenties. Rents were cheap, restaurants were cheap, and it seemed to me that happiness itself could be cheaply had. The streets and bars were full of writers and painters and the kind of young men and women who liked to be around them. In Washington Square would-be novelists and poets tossed a football near the fountain and girls just out of Ivy League colleges looked at the landscape with art history in their eyes. People on the benches held books in their hands.

—Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (1993).

2/24/19 - ‘Saint Lucy’, ceramics (with gold overglaze), 7" x 5.5" x 1"