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.. segnando i passi più profondi d'anima.. e dimmi amore dove sei? di coraggio morirei.. per venire verso te.. ma non mi muovo, no. ti aspetterò.
This sculpture really struck me right in the existentialism. The card describing it gives a quote by the artist "The thought is the eternally present fact that however closely we may be thrown together by circumstances...we are unknown to each other." The figures carved into the marble are forever linked together, and yet they can't even really see each other.
Desire does not merely select an object from an otherwise stable world. It reorganizes the world around that object. What had been background recedes. What had been peripheral becomes central. Whole regions of experience lose weight while one presence, one possibility, one imagined fulfillment begins to gather disproportionate significance. This image turns toward that subtle but powerful reordering. The city remains alive around the man—pedestrians crossing, traffic moving, lights streaking, noise implied in every motion—but none of that movement governs the scene. His attention has narrowed across the street toward a woman standing beneath her own pool of light. She is not presented as spectacle. She is simply there. Yet in the logic of the image, her presence has become the axis around which the visible world begins to tilt. The street has not literally changed. But for the one who desires, it no longer presents itself evenly.
That structure belongs deeply to the lived-world of Confessions to the Empty Chair. The book understands desire as more than appetite and more than simple preference. It treats desire as a mode of world-disclosure. What one wants changes what one notices, how one interprets, what one anticipates, and what one begins to call meaningful. This is why longing in the book often appears not as a private feeling sealed inside the subject, but as a force that alters the texture of reality itself. The desired person, outcome, memory, or possibility becomes radiant in a way the surrounding field does not. Such radiance may reveal something true, but it may also distort proportion. Desire is therefore revelatory and dangerous at once. It shows the heart what it is oriented toward, but it can also make the heart treat orientation as destiny.
Phenomenologically, the image concerns selective salience. Human beings do not receive the world as an undifferentiated set of equal stimuli. The world shows up already weighted, already arranged in terms of significance. Desire is one of the great forces that accomplish this weighting. In the image, the man does not merely look at the woman; he inhabits a world in which her presence has become decisive. The motion-blurred city around him is not unreal, but it has lost practical authority. It continues, but without claim. That is the mark of desire’s restructuring power. It does not abolish the rest of the world. It demotes it. The wanted thing becomes the organizing center not because it is objectively the only thing there, but because it has acquired interpretive priority in the consciousness of the one who wants.
This is one reason the urban crosswalk setting matters so much. A city street is full of competing claims: movement, danger, distraction, commerce, bodies, light, noise, direction. It is a world of multiplicity. To have one presence emerge as central within such a field dramatizes what desire actually does. It gathers the scattered. It creates hierarchy. It tells the soul, often without words, that this matters more than that, this is worth attending to, this is where significance now lives. The image does not need overt seduction or melodrama because desire rarely begins at that level. More often it begins with a reorganization of attention. The world starts to thin around one point. Everything else remains visible, but not equally alive.
In Confessions to the Empty Chair, this kind of reorganization carries serious psychological and moral implications. Desire is never just about possession. It is about interpretation. One does not simply want someone or something; one begins to read the world through that wanting. Small gestures acquire meaning. Distances acquire ache. Coincidences acquire symbolic force. Obstacles become intolerable or intriguing depending on how they relate to the desired center. In this sense, desire can make the world feel more vivid while also making it less truthful in proportion. It illuminates and narrows simultaneously. The soul becomes perceptive in one direction and diminished in others. That doubleness is essential to the book’s treatment of longing. Desire can awaken the self, but awakening is not identical with clarity.
Psychologically, this image also addresses the illusion of passivity in attraction. People often speak as though desire were merely reactive: something attractive appears, and the person simply notices. But lived experience shows something more complex. The self collaborates with what it wants by giving it interpretive privilege. Attention returns. Imagination elaborates. The desired presence becomes a silent reference point against which other realities are measured. The woman across the street is not doing anything theatrical here. Her stillness is part of the point. The transformative event is not outward action but inward arrangement. The man’s world has already begun to redistribute its weight around her existence. That redistribution is what the image captures more than attraction in any superficial sense.
There is also a theological seriousness to this. Human beings are creatures whose loves organize perception. We do not merely think our way through the world; we are drawn through it. What appears good, beautiful, consoling, or alive begins to gather us. That structure is not itself a defect. It belongs to creaturely existence. But the moral question enters immediately after: is the object of desire worthy of the centrality it is being granted? The soul can make idols not only of wealth, pleasure, and power, but of persons, fantasies, and emotional possibilities. Confessions to the Empty Chair is attentive to this danger. It does not deny the illuminating force of longing, but neither does it treat all longing as innocent. The heart’s rearrangements must be judged, because what feels central is not always what ought to be central.
The title therefore carries exact philosophical force. “The Room Rearranged Around Wanting” does not mean merely that the man became interested. It means that wanting altered the architecture of significance. The world did not disappear. It was re-ranked. Streets, cars, passersby, and ambient life fell into secondary status because desire had assigned a different center. This is one of the most recognizable and least admitted truths about human consciousness. We tell ourselves that reality comes first and desire responds. But often desire is already shaping how reality appears, what part of it glows, what part of it recedes, and what part of it seems worth stepping toward.
In the world of the book, such moments matter because they expose both the dignity and vulnerability of human attention. The self is not dead matter. It can be moved, gathered, and awakened. But precisely because it can be awakened, it can also be commandeered. Desire can reveal where the soul is alive. It can also reveal where the soul is unguarded. The street scene becomes, in that sense, more than a moment of attraction. It becomes a disclosure of how consciousness itself becomes ordered by longing. The man is still standing in public, still among others, still within the ordinary motion of a city night. Yet inwardly, the world has already shifted. One presence has become disproportionately real. Everything else continues, but at lower volume.
That is the burden and power of desire: it does not simply ask us to choose. It first changes what seems choosable. It trains significance before action begins. It redraws the emotional map of the visible world. And in Confessions to the Empty Chair, that redrawning is one of the places where the soul’s deeper truths begin to show themselves—quietly, unevenly, and often before the self is ready to admit just how much has already been rearranged.
There is only darkness and light. The light is alone in the darkness.
Sorry if it doesn't match the description. I liked the title, though.
'Cause I sorta' don't know what existentialism is. xP
“Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été.” (In the midst of winter, I discovered in me an invincible summer.) ― Albert Camus -- Curated by The Existentialist. Philosophy, psychology and motivation for a life of purpose and passion. FOLLOW me for original images and thought provoking quotes everyday! Please share your comments below. -- Tags: #hope, #despair, #wisdom, #truth, #monochrome, #willpower, #believe, #sad, #sadness, #blackandwhite, #existentialism. #life, #philosophy, #psychology, #inspirational, #motivation, #purpose, #quotes, #art, #beautiful, #happiness, #free, #wallpaper, #download, #business, #original, #photography, #followback #l4l #f4f. Check out this post on Instagram! ift.tt/1rNmEgS.
Two men decide the fate of a suicidal man in an image inspired by Samuel Beckett's play, "Rough for Theater II."
I will "see/know" the world betwen the "primary colors"; just like through a rainbow...
✔ Blog | alogico@tim.it
Directed by Jonathan Sweatt
Presented by Birmingham Festival Theatre
Cast:
Christopher Charleston
Timothy Seale
Celeste Burnum
Holly Dikeman
Saw this on the tube and have absolutely no idea what it means. Existentialism is polite? I should hold hands with couples at all times? Anyone know?
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wonderlustinglynda: #artontheunderground #MichaelLandy #tube #CentralLine #London #publicart #moquette #tubespotter #tubegeek #underground #transport
wonderlustinglynda: Phew I'm not stupid. It's a work of art called 'Acts of Kindness' by Michael Landy (best known for his work Breakdown where he destroyed every single possession he owned on Oxford Street)
Newest project work, the theme being Existentialism. I chose to look at how people perceive their own freedom and take it for granted, and in doing so, raise awareness for prisoners of concience. Inspired by the story of Burmese Khun Bedu, serving a 37 year prison sentence for a peaceful protest- launching a wave of informative balloons, I have designed a website giving users a platform to express and use their freedom by customizing a balloon with their own beliefs and release it upon the internet. It gives users an appreciation for their Existentialist human rights and opens their eyes to injustice worldwide. The imagery of the balloon pulling along the burden of its ball and chain highlights the potential consequences- the price of freedom. Though until the user's freedom has been exercised, the ball and chain remains hidden- its appearance leading to users questioning their freedom- "Would I have made that decision had I known the consequences?". Not knowing the risks made them truly free.
The beautiful truth is that we as human beings are free to stand against what we choose, despite the consequences. Khun Bedu and other prisoners of concience are serving unjust sentences and must be freed, but until this is achieved, they are still essentially free to believe. The balloons will continute to float despite their heavy burden.