View allAll Photos Tagged philosopher
Created with ChatGPT
The Book of Katarina by Adrian Keeley (Feat Kat Verde-Dillingham)
THE KEEPER OF MEMORY 1838ā1840
Among immortals, rumours travelled differently than they did among men.
Human gossip sought attention.
Immortal gossip sought silence.
It crossed centuries instead of borders.
It passed from one old mind to another with exquisite caution, altered only by omission, never by enthusiasm. The deadliest rumours were not the loud ones. They were the quiet ones. The ones spoken once beside a fire, then never repeated until years later in another country, by another mouth, to another creature who knew better than to dismiss them.
Most rumours vanished.
Some became legend.
A very few became important.
One such rumour reached Marius in the autumn of 1838.
It concerned no king.
No war.
No fledgling.
No ancient awakening.
It concerned books.
More precisely, books that should no longer have existed.
The first report came from Venice.
A Byzantine manuscript, believed destroyed centuries earlier, had appeared briefly in a private collection before disappearing again. The man who had seen it was unreliable in most matters, but not in books. He knew parchment. He knew ink. He knew the particular stiffness of vellum cured in the old manner.
Months later, in Vienna, another impossible item surfaced.
Then Prague.
Then Florence.
Fragments copied from Alexandrian sources believed lost forever.
A Roman correspondence thought burned during a provincial uprising.
A theological commentary from Antioch.
An annotated Greek medical text with marginal notes that predated the oldest known surviving copy by nearly six hundred years.
Each appearance was brief.
Each transaction discreet.
Each object vanished before curiosity hardened into pursuit.
Marius found this interesting.
Very interesting.
He did not investigate immediately.
Ancient vampires rarely hurried.
Time rewarded patience.
Time punished appetite.
Instead, Marius watched.
For nearly eighteen months he followed the pattern from a distance, never directly enough to alarm whoever stood at its centre. He questioned booksellers, collectors, priests, monks, bankrupt nobles, scholars, smugglers, antiquarians, and thieves.
The answers differed.
The description did not.
A woman.
Blonde.
Composed.
Educated beyond plausibility.
Fluent in languages she should not have known.
Able to identify manuscripts no living scholar had properly catalogued.
She paid fairly when payment was required.
She stole only when delay would destroy the object.
She gave no explanation.
She left no address.
Sometimes she used the name Katarina Verde.
More often she did not.
Marius heard the name only once.
It was enough.
One evening, alone in a rented house near Padua, he stood before a table covered in copied notes and quietly spoke into the silence.
"Who are you?"
No one answered.
But somewhere beneath the mountains of Europe, Katarina Verde was cataloguing another forgotten collection by candlelight.
The message reached Katarina in Ravenna.
No seal.
No signature.
No identifiable hand.
Only one sheet of heavy paper delivered through a bookseller who clearly had no idea what he carried.
Five words appeared upon it.
You preserve what was abandoned.
Nothing else.
Katarina read the message once.
Then again.
Lucien stood beside the window, where late evening light lay across the shutters in narrow gold bars.
"You know who sent this," she said.
"Yes."
"Will you tell me?"
"No."
She folded the note slowly.
"You have become irritating."
"I have always been irritating."
"True."
Lucien smiled faintly.
For several moments he looked older than usual. Not in face. Never in face. But in some deeper way, as if memory had briefly risen through the mask and shown its weight.
"Go," he said.
"That's all?"
"Yes."
"No warnings?"
He considered.
Then answered quietly.
"Listen carefully."
They met inside the basilica after midnight.
The human world slept.
Ravenna lay quiet beneath a pale spring moon. The streets outside were narrow and shadowed, the stones holding the day's warmth badly and the night's damp perfectly. The old basilica stood beyond them, solemn and beautiful, a relic of empire preserved by faith, neglect, and stubborn stone.
Within, candlelight touched the mosaics.
Gold answered gold.
Saints and emperors stared from the walls with faces made of coloured glass and time. Their eyes were flat and eternal. Their gestures formal. Their robes arranged in patterns no living hand could improve.
Katarina entered alone.
At first she saw no one.
Then a figure turned beneath the glittering vault.
Marius.
She recognised him immediately, though they had never met.
Not from description.
From presence.
Some immortals carried age like exhaustion.
Some carried it like cruelty.
Marius carried it like civilisation itself.
He looked less like a predator than a philosopher who had accidentally become immortal and then spent two thousand years refusing to surrender either beauty or thought.
He regarded her with calm curiosity.
For several moments neither spoke.
Then he smiled.
"So."
His voice was quiet.
"You exist."
Katarina returned the smile.
"I was about to say the same."
They walked through the basilica as if through the memory of an empire.
Neither hurried.
Neither attempted to impress the other.
That alone distinguished the meeting from almost every immortal encounter Katarina had experienced.
Marius paused before one of the mosaics and looked up at the gold.
"Ravenna remembers better than Rome," he said.
"Stone remembers better than men."
"That depends upon the men."
"No," Katarina said. "It depends upon who writes after they die."
He looked at her then, fully.
The first test had arrived sooner than expected.
"You distrust memory."
"I respect it too much to trust it."
A faint amusement touched his mouth.
"An interesting contradiction."
"A necessary one."
"Explain."
Katarina looked toward the mosaic saints.
"The living change what they remember. The dead cannot correct them. A written record is imperfect, but at least it can be compared against another."
"And if both are false?"
"Then the silence between them becomes evidence."
Marius was still for several seconds.
Then he laughed softly.
"Lucien taught you well."
That was the first time he said Lucien's name.
Katarina did not react.
Not visibly.
Marius noticed anyway.
They spoke until dawn forced them apart.
On the second night they returned to the basilica.
On the third, they walked beyond it, through sleeping Ravenna, past old walls and quiet canals, past churches filled with saints and the dust of forgotten patrons.
Their subjects widened.
Rome.
Byzantium.
Alexandria.
The nature of art.
The arrogance of kings.
The fragility of libraries.
The persistent stupidity of men who burned books believing they had destroyed ideas.
Katarina found Marius infuriatingly courteous.
Marius found Katarina dangerously precise.
Neither disliked the discovery.
On the third night, beneath a ruined arch outside the city, Marius finally asked the question she had known was coming.
"You have answered every question except one."
Katarina looked toward him.
"Which one?"
"How."
The word required no elaboration.
How had she found the manuscripts?
How had she preserved them?
How had a vampire scarcely older than sixty gathered fragments that Marius himself believed lost to war, fire, negligence, and time?
Katarina studied him.
Then she said, "Walk with me."
They left Ravenna before dawn.
Not openly.
Not together in any human sense.
They travelled as immortals travel when they wish to remain unseen.
By night.
Across country roads, abandoned estates, sleeping villages, forest paths and mountain passes. Marius never asked where they were going after the first night. Katarina never volunteered the answer.
The journey lasted nearly three weeks.
It changed them.
Conversation in a basilica has shape.
Conversation upon a road has truth.
There were no mosaics to protect them from silence. No sacred gold to dignify every pause. There was only the night, the changing land, and the peculiar intimacy of shared movement.
They crossed northern Italy beneath storm clouds.
They entered Switzerland under a sky filled with hard stars.
They followed the Rhine northward through mist and rain.
On the seventh night, Marius spoke of Pandora.
Not at length.
Not romantically.
But with the care one uses when touching an old wound.
Katarina listened.
On the ninth, Katarina spoke of her mother.
Ilona.
The woman who had warned her not to love truth more than people.
Marius listened.
On the twelfth, he asked about Lestat.
She did not answer immediately.
That told him more than an answer would have.
"Ah," he said softly.
"Do not say ah."
"I said very little."
"You implied a great deal."
"That is often more efficient."
She almost smiled.
Almost.
Near the end of the journey, they entered a region of dense forest and ruined religious houses. The monastery they approached appeared abandoned, as it was meant to appear. Its outer walls had partially collapsed. Ivy claimed the chapel. The graveyard stones leaned at odd angles. No road led directly to it.
A place forgotten by all useful authorities.
Marius looked at the ruin and said nothing.
Katarina led him through the chapel, beneath a broken altar, down a stair concealed beneath stone.
The air changed as they descended.
Dry.
Cool.
Preserved.
At the first iron door she produced a key.
At the second, she placed her palm against a carved panel and pressed three hidden points in sequence.
At the third, she stopped.
"This is not the first Archive," she said.
Marius looked at her.
"Nor the greatest?"
"No."
"Then why this one?"
"Because if you are going to judge me, you should begin with something modest."
The corner of his mouth lifted.
"Prudent."
"Necessary."
The final door opened.
For the first time since Katarina had known his name, Marius was silent from astonishment.
The chamber beyond was vast.
Not a room.
A buried library.
Stone shelves rose in ordered rows beneath arched ceilings supported by pillars older than the monastery above. Lamps burned in niches without smoke. Cedar chests lined the walls. Bronze cabinets held scrolls sealed in treated leather. Manuscripts rested inside fitted cases. Maps lay flat beneath polished glass. Every object was labelled, dated, cross-referenced.
Not a hoard.
Not a collector's vanity.
A system.
Memory made architecture.
Marius stepped inside slowly.
His eyes moved from shelf to shelf.
Greek.
Latin.
Arabic.
Hebrew.
Syriac.
Armenian.
Old Persian.
Church Slavonic.
Languages dead, dying, reborn, miscopied, politicised, sanctified.
He touched nothing at first.
That restraint told Katarina more than reverence would have.
At last he whispered, "Impossible."
"No."
Her voice was quiet.
"Only forgotten."
For three nights Marius walked the Archive.
He read titles aloud as though naming ghosts.
He recognised copies of works he had seen burned.
Fragments of treatises debated by men dead before Charlemagne.
A Roman inventory from a villa he had visited in mortal life.
A theological argument whose author he had once met and disliked.
A medical manuscript containing diagrams copied from an Alexandrian source Marius had believed lost forever.
Again and again he stopped.
Again and again his face changed.
Not dramatically.
Marius was too old for that.
But grief, when refined by centuries, becomes almost invisible.
Katarina saw it.
She understood it.
On the fourth night she brought him a leather-bound journal.
"This was copied in the sixth century," she said.
"From what?"
"We believe from a private Roman record."
Marius opened it.
The page was written in a careful monastic hand.
Then he stopped.
His fingers tightened almost imperceptibly on the edge of the book.
Katarina waited.
He turned one page.
Then another.
His expression altered.
Recognition.
Not of the scribe.
Of the words.
"Mine," he said.
"Yes."
"A copy."
"Yes."
He lowered his head over the page.
For a long time he read without speaking.
Finally he stopped at one passage.
His voice, when it came, was almost a whisper.
"I had forgotten."
Katarina did not ask at once.
The silence deserved respect.
At last she said, "What?"
"The colour."
"What colour?"
"The evening sky."
He smiled, but the expression was painful.
"I remembered the fire. The smoke. The screams. I remembered the smell of wet ash on marble."
His fingertips rested upon the page.
"I had forgotten the sky was violet."
Katarina remained still.
Nothing needed saying.
The manuscript had made her argument for her.
Memory fades.
Ink endures.
Not perfectly.
Not purely.
But sometimes enough.
Later, they sat across from one another at a long oak table beneath the Archive lamps.
The copied journal rested between them.
Marius looked around at the shelves.
"Why?"
The question was not accusation.
It was wonder.
Katarina closed the catalogue before her.
"Because people think immortality defeats death."
"It does not."
"No."
She looked toward the rows of preserved lives.
"It merely postpones one kind. The second death comes when no one remembers."
Marius watched her carefully.
"And you appoint yourself enemy of that death?"
"No."
She almost smiled.
"I appoint myself its inconvenience."
He laughed then.
Fully.
The sound startled the room.
For perhaps the first time since Ravenna, something like warmth passed easily between them.
Before he left, Marius placed a wooden chest upon the table.
Katarina had not seen him bring it in.
That meant he had chosen the moment deliberately.
"What is it?" she asked.
"The next two thousand years."
She stared at him.
He opened the lid.
Inside lay copies.
Not originals.
Never originals.
Marius was generous, not reckless.
Journals.
Travel accounts.
Observations.
Fragments of correspondence.
Notes on art, cities, languages, mortals, immortals, temples, wars, and the endless stupidity of rulers.
Katarina looked from the chest to him.
"You trust me."
Marius considered.
"I trust your purpose."
There was a difference.
She appreciated it.
"And the Archive?"
He closed the chest gently.
"I will not speak of it."
"Not even to those you love?"
Something moved across his face then.
Pandora.
Armand.
Others.
The many beloved dead and living.
"No," he said.
"Not even to those I love."
Lucien appeared only after Marius had gone.
He stood at the threshold of the chamber and looked at the chest upon the table.
Then at Katarina.
"So."
"So."
"How much did you tell him?"
"Very little."
"And how much did he understand?"
Katarina looked across the Archive, toward the shelf where Marius's copied journal now rested beside histories that had outlived empires.
She smiled faintly.
"Everything."
Lucien nodded.
For once, he did not correct her.
Years later, when immortals spoke of Marius, they remembered the Roman.
The scholar.
The painter.
The guardian.
The one who had preserved Those Who Must Be Kept.
Few knew another truth.
That somewhere beneath forgotten stone, behind doors no mortal would ever find, Marius had entrusted part of his own memory to a blonde archivist from the Carpathians.
Not because she was stronger than he.
Not because she was older.
But because, after nearly two thousand years of watching beauty perish, he had found someone who understood that memory itself required shelter.
And in that recognition, two keepers of time had become friends.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Image Prompt - Ultra-photorealistic IMAX cinematic photograph, 16:9. Deep beneath the earth inside an immense hidden archive of forgotten civilizations, Marius de Romanus and Katarina Verde sit at a massive centuries-old oak table studying an opened sixth-century leather-bound journal. Marius is tall, classically handsome, clean-shaven, with shoulder-length pale golden-blond curls, brilliant blue eyes and noble Roman features, wearing an elegant burgundy velvet frock coat, ivory waistcoat, high-collared white shirt, black cravat and subtle gold watch chain. Katarina wears her lavender-and-black Victorian gown with long golden-blonde curls. The archive is entirely subterraneanāno windows, no daylight, no shafts of natural light. Endless vaulted stone chambers disappear into darkness, packed with towering oak shelves holding thousands of ancient manuscripts, scrolls, codices and relics from forgotten empires. Narrow stone aisles, carved arches, iron ladders, chained cabinets, sealed chests, marble busts and weathered globes create the sense of a secret repository spanning centuries. Illumination comes only from oil lamps, candles and wrought-iron wall sconces casting warm amber pools of light against deep shadows. Dust hangs in the still air, leather textures and aged parchment glow softly, cinematic depth, museum-quality historical realism, intimate scholarly atmosphere, razor-sharp detail, no windows, no sunlight, no skylights, no watermark.
Pic, Prompt and Story by Adrian
The #FlickrFriday #ABitOfOrder challenge
"Probably the simplest hypothesis... is that there may be a slow process of annihilation of matter."
- Sir Arthur Eddington; Physicist, Astronomer, Philosopher 1882-1944
____________________________________________
We live in a highly ordered world. That unremarkable statement may seem to reflect our obsession with neatness, organisation and timeliness. However let's look at what physics has to say about what it believes order actually is.
Physics, among other things, introduces the term entropy to express how ordered a system is. Mathematically speaking, it is the number of possible configurations of its component parts which allow the system to exist at all, divided by the total number of possible ways those parts may be configured. Low entropy therefore describes a high degree of order. Physicists frequently explain abstract ideas like this by reference to simple situations so let's do so.
Consider going to the seaside, packing damp sand into a bucket, smartly inverting it onto the beach, and removing the bucket in the time honoured fashion. We have made a sandcastle, a simple structure (or system) which can only exist if the grains of sand are configured in a limited number of ways. There are many more ways in which those grains may be arranged, the vast majority of them being unremarkable piles of sand, each pile looking much like all the others. A small number of configurations capable of creating a system divided by a much larger possible number of configurations results in a fraction with a small number on top and a much larger number beneath. That would be a small number, representing low entropy which means a high degree of order.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics provides that the entropy of an isolated system, left alone, cannot decrease. Put another way, a system cannot become more organised (or ordered) than it was when we started observing it. Although The Second Law allows the possibility that a system would remain the same throughout time, in practice entropy always increases, accounting for the fact that things decay, wear out, or fall apart. Increasing entropy represents reducing order. Spontaneous repair does not happen without some kind of intervention, an example of which could be an injury which heals. Healing requires an input of resources which we may regard as energy.
Returning to our sandcastle, as the day progresses, its sand dries, reducing adhesion. Grains start to fall or are blown away causing the structure to lose shape. Its entropy increases, shown by it becoming an unremarkable pile of sand, increasingly indistinguishable from any other sand pile. Its entropy continues to increase, ultimately matching that of the even higher entropy beach.
Now let's extrapolate from sandcastles to The Universe. Nobody can accuse me of lack of ambition! Recall that, from The Second Law of Thermodynamics, Entropy increases as time passes. Consider an abandoned car rusting away into dust; a fallen tree being converted to soil through consumption by fungi; a building falling into disrepair; a small space rock entering our atmosphere and burning up, delighting observers as it presents itself as a shooting star while scattering its atoms among our atmosphere; two asteroids colliding, smashing each other into bits; a comet leaving a trail of dust illuminated by The Sun; and a star exploding in a supernova event, spreading its matter over huge distances. All exemplify increasing entropy. Back on Earth, many of us earn our crusts repairing what we (or more accurately, The Second Law of Thermodynamics) break or wear out. Tradesmen (and DIY stores) earn their livings courtesy of The Second Law and as they can never reverse it, they will always be in business!
This all leads us to the concept of The Arrow of Time created by the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington. When The Arrow points to the future, Eddington, applying The Second Law, expects greater randomness or disorder; in other words, higher entropy than now. Recall our sandcastle which we may now regard as a metaphor for the prediction that in about 10 trillion years time the galaxies we may assume will live for all time will be gone. All that will be left will be atomic and subatomic particles (including particles which had once combined to form the extremely low entropy us), randomly moving around in unimaginably vast nothingness, so vast that the probability of those particles ever again interacting to create anything at all is, functionally speaking, zero. That's the bleakest of predictions of our destiny but 10 trillion years is a long time, maybe even long enough for my football team to win something meaningful. Or perhaps not, but anyway, there's no need to cancel your Flickr Pro subs just yet.
Conversely, when The Arrow points to the past we see a more ordered world and universe. We might even imagine our sandcastle rebuilding itself from the pile of sand it had become. Go back far enough and we encounter God creating Heaven and Earth, or, according to your belief, the Big Bang when scientists tell us The Universe was simple and highly ordered.
A photo of a disintegrating watch overlaid on Genesis 1 as recorded in an old Bible therefore seems to me to be an apt metaphor for The Arrow of Time. It was created by duplicating and resizing twice a single photo of a watch with liquefying applied through Photoshop and various bits deleted and cloned to represent disintegration as time passes. Mould marks on the page and creases are faintly visible despite the increased saturation I applied to add colour to the image. They demonstrate increasing entropy in themselves.
Disconnected Philosophers.
Besondere Existenz Auflƶsungen Schmelzen Bewusstsein wesentlichen Grundlagen beschlagnahmt,
nullius recogniciones in libertatem transfigurentur negationes desideria,
formes d'expressions restants unitƩ essences universelles prƩsentƩs,
ĻĻĪæĻĪ“Ī¹ĪæĻĪ¹ĻĪ¼ĪæĪÆ ĻĪ±ĻĪ±ĻĪ·ĻĻĪ½ĻĪ±Ļ Ī±Ī½ĻĪÆĪøĪµĻĪ·, ĪŗĪ±ĻĪ¬ ĻĻ Ī½ĪĻĪµĪ¹Ī±, Ī¼ĪµĻĪ±Ī¾Ļ ĻĪ·Ļ ĪµĻĪÆĪ“ĪµĪ¹Ī¾Ī·Ļ Ī“ĻĪ¬ĻĪµĻĪ½ Ī±Ī¼ĪæĪ¹Ī²Ī±ĪÆĪæĻ ,
ŃŠ¾Š·Š½Š°ŃŠµŠ»ŃŠ½Š¾Šµ Š½ŠµŃŃŃŃŠæŃŠøŠ²ŃŠ¹ ŃŃŠ“ŃŠ±Š° ŃŠ¾ŃŃŠ¾ŃŃŠøŠ¹ Š°ŠŗŃŃŠ°Š»ŃŠ½Š¾ŃŃŃ ŠŗŃŠ°ŃŠ½Š¾ŃŃŃ Š²ŠµŃŠµŃŃŠ²Š¾ Š½ŠµŠ¼ŠµŠ“Š»ŠµŠ½Š½Š¾Šµ,
komplisert forstĆ„else praktisk talt tilbĆøyeligheter skjule dyder flom,
moralister sprƄk otaliga synonyma vƤrderingarna fƶdda,
megelÅzte oktatĆ”s fĆ©ltĆ©keny hitelĆ©t nƶvedĆ©kek olvas,
faculdades censurĆ”veis āāambiciosos fileiras questionĆ”veis āādiferentes experiĆŖncias curvo,
enigmas intleachtĆŗil modhanna cur isteach ar instincts paradoxical shines,
epistemologica creationem rerum, videtur quod non fuerit audacia appellationibus,
ŠµŠ½ŠµŃŠ³ŠøŃŠ½Š¾ ŃŠµŃŃŠ¾ ŠæŃŠøŃŃŃŠ°ŃŠ½Š¾ŃŃ ŃŠ°Š¼Š¾ŃŠ° Š·Š°ŠŗŃŃŃŠ° ŠµŠ½ŃŃ Š°ŠøŠ½ŠµŠ“ Š½Š°ŃŠ°Š²ŃŃŃŠµ Š±ŃŠ“ŃŃŠ½Š¾ŃŃ,
arddangosiadau agosrwydd wybodaeth reciprocals rhagweladwy am gyfnod amhenodol interposition yn,
rezĆ²nman matematik Ć©chanj a lokal posibilite dyalĆØktik inivĆØsĆØl montre fo,
fyrst og fremst Ć” mĆ³ti flĆ³kiĆ° tilveru undirlag presupposed efni,
čŖæę»ć®ććć»ć¹ć®č¤éćŖēøäŗć«ē”éć®åććęčµ·åē §åÆč½ē§å¦ćē “å£.
Steve.D.Hammond.
THE CLOCK TOWER SECTION
Hi guys, finally here we have this MOC that I have been working on during months. This Diorama represents from the left to de right; The Whomping Willow, the Stone Circle entrance that connects to the Wooden Bridge that I have omitted for space reasons in this MOC, and Hagridās Hut. In the Back we have the section of Hogwarts that represents the Gryffindor Tower, the Clock Tower and also the North Tower, where the Divination classroom is located.
After the completion of my last MOC, I decided that from then on each MOC that made the Hogwarts Castle would be based only on one or two films in order to recreate them as completely as possible. Because the clock tower is a new section in the Azkaban prisoner film, I decided to focus on this film, but when LEGO released the new Harry Potter sets I finally dedicated the castle to the first three Harry Potter films, thus recreating the final scenes of the philosopher's stone and the secret chamber.
The nicest parts of this long sakura path I think is where the canal curves.
The canal waters are very clean, you can clearly see large wild carp feeding on waterweeds at the canal bottom.
Tackling colors with this RAW, moving away from Sony defaults, beyond mere tweaks to hue and WB or colour balance, got to experiment.
The previous shot was still with default Sony colour profile.
Can't help but to also wonder if it's the overly cold colour signature of this Sony Zeiss 24-70mm f4.0, my shots with this lens never grew on me.
Described as a portrait of a Philosopher from 5th century. (Aphrodisias Museum )
The ancient city of Aphrodisias, once the capital of the province of Lydia, is located near the village of Geyre in the district of Karacasu . The history of the city can be traced back to the early bronze age and there is even clear evidence of a chalcolithic culture prior to the 3rd millennium B.C. The use of the name Aphrodisias began after the 3rd century B.C., in the Hellenistic period.
The wealth and cultural and political importance of the city is clearly attested by the size and magnificence of the buildings of which it is composed.The name Aphrodisias is derived from Aphrodite, the goddess of nature, beauty, love and plenty, and was one of the most famous cult centres of the goddess.
Aphrodisias was a center for the arts, specifically sculpture. The Aphrodisias School of Sculpture had a distinctive style and was very well circulated throughout the Greek and Roman world. Statues with corresponding signatures have been discovered from Spain to present day Germany and virtually everywhere in the Roman world.
The Aphrodisias Sculpting School was one of the most famous sculpting school in antiquity. Among the provocative pieces preserved today are statues of Aphrodite cradling a child like a loving mother; Hercules rippling his muscles; and a woman weeping, which symbolized the subjugation of the city by Rome. Any rich noblemen who donated money to the school was honored with a statue, and there are plenty of these, as well as some magnificent friezes and sarcophagi, in the museum.
The Aphrodisias sculpting school thrived for 600 years, and the high-quality marble for the sculptures was found in abundance in quarries only a few miles away. The sculptors, some scholars claim, were the world's the first true artists, meaning they didn't just copy other statues like many Greek and Roman sculptors; instead they made unique creations.
I met him at the Bluebird coffeeshop in Amsterdam and he immediately begin to talk to me about the meaning of love and 'god' money in the world and so on...
It has been a brief encounter with a really interesting person who surely is going to remain in my mind for a long time yet.....
He took the business of having his picture taken very seriously; such an interesting face.
Guebwiller, France
āPoets are the sense, philosophersĀĀ the intelligenceĀĀ of humanity.ā
ā Samuel Beckett
seen this today morning while going to office. Didn't had my DSLR with me. hence captured with mobile resulted lower quality.
The Philosopher III
Over the clouds she recognizes:
This is my Head
HKD
Der Philosoph auf dem Gipfel
Mit seiner TrophƤe Ć¼ber den Wolken angekommen
erkennt er: Das ist mein eigener Kopf.
HKD
Die Beute des Philosophen ist sein eigenes Ego.
Er kƶnnte auch ausrufen: Tat tvam asi
Der Gipfel der Selbstkonfrontation und der Selbsterkenntnis zeigt gleichzeitig, wie unbewusst das naive Ego-Bewusstsein ist und war.
Ich weiĆ, dass ich nichts wusste. Ich weiĆ, dass ich nichts weiĆ.
(Frei nach Sokrates :-))
HKD
These are the last photos of my project Liberty Plaza, for now.
It was a great project and really fun to build ! I hope you enjoyed the photos as much as I did ! If you missed any, here.is the set containing all the photos of this project.
Thanks for your support !
Now it's time to move on to other great projects like:
-another Clone Wars story
-more mechs
-a Force Unleashed MoC
and the one project I am most exited about
A Lego Mass Effect RPG group ! Please, support this project by telling us (Agent "Wash" Washington and me) if you are interested, here.
EDIT: The group has been created. It's called N7 Special Forces. Feel free to join !
Thanks again for you support !
The Pesquet's Parrot is a highly specialised frugivore, feeding almost exclusively on a few species of figs. Flowers and nectar have also been reported. At least in parts of its range, it is seasonally nomadic in response to the availability of fruits. The bare part of the head is presumably an adaption to avoid feather-matting from sticky fruits. Little is known about its breeding habits in the wild, but the two eggs are laid in a nest in a large, hollow tree. It is typically seen in pairs or groups up to 20 individuals. In flight it alternates between rapid flapping and short glides.
~ Wikipedia