Usually Melancholy

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A scroll-down view of my photos with 'fluidr' in a single column.

www.fluidr.com/photos/usually_melancholy/interesting

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"There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness. Had we been placed on earth by a malign creator for the exclusive purpose of suffering, we would have good reason to congratulate ourselves on our enthusiastic response to the task. Reasons to be inconsolable abound: the frailty of our bodies, the fickleness of love, the insincerities of social life, the compromises of friendship, the deadening effects of habit. In the face of such persistent ills, we might naturally expect that no event would be awaited with greater anticipation than the moment of our own extinction."

Alain De Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life. (1)

amzn.com/0679779159

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Musee des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

 

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mus%C3%A9e_des_Beaux_Arts_(poem)

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I recently (2013/07/30) reverted the license on my images from 'All rights..." to one of the Creative Commons options. Feel free to use them if you find one you like...maybe let me know if you do, but you don't have to. They are now, and will remain, licensed as Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeriv. Thanks!

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