LifeinLife Books

30/12/2019

“In quoting others, we cite ourselves”
― Julio Cortázar

30/12/2019

“Of all our feelings the only one which really doesn't belong to us is hope. Hope belongs to life, it's life itself defending itself.”
― Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch

25/02/2019

“Since olden times, there has rarely been a sage who was wealthy.”

Yoshida Kenko, 14th-century philosopher

18/01/2019

“This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.”

—Mary Oliver

19/11/2018

In his 1978 essay on Sontag’s book, John Berger writes: “If we want to put a photograph back into the context of experience, social experience, social memory, we have to respect the laws of memory.”

22/10/2018

Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot
recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

Emily Dickinson

24/08/2018

We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Scientific American (1992), Vol. 267.

John Archibald Wheeler

17/03/2018

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Oscar Wilde

27/02/2018

"The essential point is to consider love as a spectrum. There is not, as it were just nice love and nasty love, spiritual love and material love, mature affection on the one hand and infatuation on the other. These are all forms of the same energy. And you have to take it and let it grow where you find it. When you find only one of these forms existing, if at least you will water it, the rest will blossom as well. But the effectual prerequisite from the beginning is to let it have its own way."
- Alan Watts, The Spectrum of Love

24/11/2017

There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made.
Deleuze, Guattari, A thousand plateaus

23/11/2017

SE CALHAR IDADE
(o livro-encontro)

"O encontro é uma ferida. Uma ferida que, de uma maneira tão delicada quanto brutal, alarga o possível e o pensável, sinalizando outros mundos e outros modos para se viver juntos, ao mesmo tempo que subtrai passado e futuro com a sua emergência disruptiva.
O encontro só é mesmo encontro quando a sua aparição acidental é percebida como oferta, aceite e retríbuída. Dessa implicação recíproca emerge um meio, um ambiente mínimo cuja duração se irá, aos poucos, desenhando, marcando e inscrevendo como paisagem comum. O encontro, então, só se efectua – só termina de emergir e começa a acontecer – se for reparado e consecutivamente contra-efectuado – isto é, assistido, manuseado, cuidado, (re)feito a cada vez in-terminável."

O encontro só é mesmo encontro quando a sua aparição acidental é percebida como oferta, aceite e retríbuída. Dessa implicação recíproca emerge um meio, um ambiente mínimo cuja duração se irá, aos poucos, desenhando, marcando e inscrevendo como paisagem comum. O encontro, então, só se efectua – só te...

16/11/2017

In Proust, laziness first combats easy ambitions, then laziness becomes patience, and patience becomes tireless work, a feverish impatience fighting with time when time is counted.
showing us how the writers are threatened, and how much they need energy, inertia, vacancy, attention, distraction, to go to the end of what they propose. It is this aspect the secret intimate patience, by which one gives oneself time.

04/11/2017

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”

― Charles William Eliot

12/10/2017

What does it mean to touch an image, not merely to look at it? What are the ethics of the images we choose to touch, of those we are allowed to see, and of the images we don't see but know in fact to exist? Does the production, storage and circulation of images today imply a responsibility to, or to care for, them? Curator and writer Joao Ribas reflects on the task of attending to images that call out to us and the aesthetic effects they produce, instilling in us a need to store or share them. Arguing that contemporary images force us to move beyond basic aesthetic categories into the realm of the ethics of new affects, Ribas explores the demands images make today, as well as our current forms of iconoclasm and mediation. Do we need to develop ethically informed rather than legally compelled ways to deal with images in our digital condition? Or are we perhaps merely the parasitic host of images, which now replicate themselves through us, their deeper genetic purpose hidden?
Joao Ribas MIT Media Lab

Webradio dedicata alla dimensione sonora dell’arte e cultura contemporanea; RP è un archivio accessibile di soundart, interviste, documentari, musica.

11/10/2017

We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe. - Upanishads.

23/09/2017

“O mundo da luz e da imagem tornou-se, pelo medo e pela fadiga do olhar, um mundo no qual cresce desproporcional e exponencialmente o subterrâneo da sombra e do esquecimento. Quanto mais se quer expor, mostrar, tornar visível, tanto mais se consegue apenas aparentar, esconder, simular ou ofuscar.” (BAITELLO JR., 2005: 21)

23/09/2017

Joan Didion once wrote that her writing came out of “images that shimmer around the edges . . . everything interacting, exchanging ions.”

19/09/2017

Samuel Beckett — 'To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.'

16/09/2017

Era a memória ardente a inclinar-se
à giesta do tempo por frescura
mas o que em seu espelho se figura
vê que está só e a mesma dor foi dar-se

noite e dia e silente de amargura
uma saudade em febre o viu queimar-se
até vir por um "sim" a consolar-se
e do perdão mudo hino lhe assegura

levando imagens e sinais de vez
O olhar liberto penetrou no assento
do alto luto onde da palidez

dos invernos se erguia outro rebento
de cálices que embalam as sementes
dando ao nome louvado descendentes.

Walter Benjamin, in "Sonetos". Tradução de Vasco Graça Moura.

01/09/2017

"What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream."
FAULKNER

29/08/2017

'When anything has become habitual to the soul it soon grows natural, and when it has grown natural it becomes a veil.'
—Al Hujwiri

20/08/2017

In A year from Monday, John Cage wrote of Jasper Johns' craftsmanship:

"Looking closely helps, though ... there is the danger of falling in love. We moderate each glance with a virtuous degree of blindness."

20/08/2017

"Do you know that it is very, very necessary for honest people to remain in art? Hardly anyone knows that the secret of beautiful work lies to a great extent in truth and sincere sentiment."

Vincent Van Gogh

20/08/2017

15/08/2017

"As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost."

E. B. White, Foreword to Essays of E. B. White, Harper & Row, NY, 1977.

09/08/2017

"Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating and all that remains is work: the work of becoming expert through study and practice, the work of finding solutions to problems and problems with those solutions, the work of trial and error, the work of thinking and perfecting, the work of creating. Creating consumes. It is all day, every day. It knows neither weekends nor vacations. It is not when we feel like it. It is habit, compulsion, obsession, vocation. The common thread that links creators is how they spend their time. No matter what you read, no matter what they claim, nearly all creators spend nearly all their time on the work of creation. There are few overnight successes and many up-all-night successes."

https://medium.com//creative-people-say-no-bad7c34842a2

11/07/2017

"…I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
-- James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

11/07/2017

deux maximes de Delacroix :
« Finir demande un cœur d’acier » et
« Le talent, c’est 90 % de besogne. »

06/07/2017

Car vraiment s’il y a quelque chose que je crois, c’est qu’absolument il faut chaque jour s’oublier. C’est-à-dire, comme il nous plaît, ou s’endormir, ou s’illusionner ou rêver ou rire. [...] Mais encore on n’oublie pas tout seul et j’ai besoin que vous me racontiez des histoires.»

George Bataille, billet de l’été 1922, adressé à Colette R.

29/06/2017

“This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970) xv.

28/06/2017

D.- What other plane can there be for the
maker?

B.-Logically none. Yet I speak of an art turning
from it in disgust, weary of puny exploits,
weary of pretending to be able, of being able,
of doing a little better the same old thing, of
going a little further along a dreary road.

D.- And preferring what?

B.-The expression that there is nothing to
express, nothing with which to express, nothing
from which to express, no power to express, no
desire to express, together with the obligation
to express.

Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit

25/06/2017

" El buen viajero es aquel que no sabe a donde va. El viajero perfecto ni siquiera sabe de donde viene "

LinYUTANG

13/06/2017

‘Life is infinitely great and profound as the immensity of the stars above us. One can only look at it through the narrow keyhole of one’s personal experience. But through it one perceives more than one can see. So above all one must keep the keyhole clean.’

—Franz Kafka, Conversations with Gustav Janouch

07/06/2017

Nous appartenons à la fin de la philosophie, fin nécessairement ambiguë … qui, en tant que fin, n’en finit pas, peut durer de longues périodes historiques, mais qui, comme telle, nous investit de tâches radicalement autres auxquelles ne sauraient convenir les anciennes étiquettes.

Maurice Blanchot

17/05/2017

Tudo será construído no silêncio, pela força do silêncio, mas o pilar mais forte da construção será uma palavra. Tão viva e densa como o silêncio e que, nascida do silêncio, ao silêncio conduzirá.

António Ramos Rosa