Dinesh's photos

In this Renaissance painting Boethius (C.AD 480-525) listens to the words of the Lady Philosophy. The Consolation of Philosophy is his most famous book, and consolation was that he needed as he awaited execution. But philosophy has had many purposes besides this one. In 523 Boethius fell from power. After a period of imprisonment in Pavia for what was deemed a treasonable offence, he was executed in 524. www.gutenberg.org/files/14328/14328-h/14328-h.htm plato.stanford.edu/entries/boethius

You sit in a chair, touched by nothing, feeling The old self become older self, imagining Only the patience of water, the boredom of a stone. You think that silence is the extra page, You think nothing is good or bad, not even the Darkness that fills the house while you sit watching It happen. You’ve seen it happen before. Your friends Move past the window their face soiled with regret. You want to wave but cannot raise your hand. You sit in a chair, you turn to the night shade spreading A poisonous net around the house. You taste The honey of absence. It is the same wherever You are, the same if the voice rots before The body, or the body rots before the voice. You know that desire leads only to sorrow, that sorrow Leads to achievements which leads to emptiness. You know that this is different, that this Is a celebration, the only celebration That by giving yourself over to nothing, You shall be healed. You know that there is joy in feeling Your lungs prepare themselves for an ashen future, so you wait, you stare and wait, and the dust settles And the miraculous hours of childhood wander in darkness “In celebration” ~ Mark Strand www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mark-strand

They’re visible in the southern sky, and for centuries people have gazed up at them. They’re named after the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, in our current times. The Magellanic Clouds have been known since ancient times to indigenous peoples across South America and Africa, and from the first millennium in Western Asia. The first preserved mention of the Large Magellanic Cloud is believed to be in petroglyphs and rock drawings found in Chile. They may be the objects mentioned by the polymath Ibn Qutaybah (d. 889 CE), in his book on Al-Anwā̵’ (the stations of the Moon in pre-Islamic Arabian culture): "وأسفل من سهيل قدما سهيل . وفى مجرى قدمى سهيل، من خلفهما كواكب زهر كبار، لا ترى بالعراق، يسميها أهل تهامة الأعبار en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellanic_Clouds

jkrishnamurti.org

Post Monsoon season

The Hollywood Walk of Fame is a historic landmark which consists of more than 2,700 five-pointed terrazzo and brass stars embedded in the sidewalks en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlon_Brando

From Traveler to Tourist Sometime past the middle of the nineteenth century, as the Graphic Revolution was getting under way, the character of foreign travel -- first by Europeans, and then by Americans began to change. This change has reached a climax in our day. Formerly travel required long planning, large expense, and great investments of time. It involved risks to health or even to life. The traveler was active. Now he became passive. Instead of an athletic exercise, travel became a spectator sport. This change can be described in a word. It was the decline of the traveler and the rise of the tourist. There is a wonderful, but neglected precision in these words. The old English word as “travail” (meaning “trouble,” “work,” or “torment”). And the word “travail,” in turn, seems to have been derived, through the French, from a popular Latin or Common Romanic word “tripalium,” which meant a three-staked instrument of torture. To journey -- to “travail,” or (later) to travel -- then was to do something laborious or troublesome. The traveler was an active man at work. ~ Page 297

A family of alchemists at work, an engraving of Philip Galle, after a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, published by Hieronymus Cock, c. 1558

............................... Wakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprig sang under my tongue, its drifting fragrance climbed up through my conscious mind as if suddenly the roots I had left behind cried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood--- and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent. "Lost in the Forest" ~ Pablo Neruda

When the suitcase finally did catch on at the end of the 19th century, it was quite literally a case for suits. A typical suitcase came equipped with an inner sleeve for storing shirts, and sometimes a little hat box on the side. But even in the early 20th century, the “dress-suit case” was only one of countless styles of container that travelers could buy, from steamer trunks to club bags to Eveready portable wardrobes. These were boom times for the baggage business. www.smithsonianmag.com/history/history-humble-suitcase-180951376