Ginger Magnum

I had a certain talent for friendship,  but I never had friends, either because there were'nt any or because the friendship I conceived was an error of my dreams . I always lived in isolation, increasingly so the more I lived conscious of myself.   Fernando Pessoa  The Book of Disquiet .

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.  Aldous Huxley

“There are decades where nothing happens; and  there  are weeks where decades happen.” Vladimit Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)

To  know  more, one must  feel  less, and  vice versa … Nature, the soul, love, and God, one recognizes through the heart, and not through the reason. Were we spirits, we could dwell in that region of ideas over which our souls hover, seeking the solution. But we are earth-born beings, and can only guess at the Idea — not grasp it by all sides at once. The guide for our intelligences through the temporary illusion into the innermost centre of the soul is called  Reason . Now, Reason is a material capacity, while the soul or spirit lives on the thoughts which are whispered by the heart. Thought is born in the soul. Reason is a tool, a machine, which is driven by the spiritual fire. When human reason … penetrates into the domain of knowledge, it works independently of the  feeling , and consequently of the  heart . letters to his family - Fyodor Mikailovitch Dostoevsky

A scarce, artificial and belated phenomenon, love can only blossom under certain mental conditions, rarely conjoined, and totally opposed to the freedom of morals which characterizes the modern era. Veronique had known too many discotheques, too many lovers; such a way of life impoverishes a human being, inflicting sometimes serious and always irreversible damage. Love as a kind of innocence and as a capacity for illusion, as an aptitude for epitomizing the whole of the other sex in a single loved being rarely resists a year of sexual immortality, and never two. In reality the successive sexual experiences accumulated during adolescence undermine and rapidly destroy all possibility of projection of an emotional and romantic sort; progressively, and in fact extremely quickly, one becomes as capable of love as an old slag. And so one leads, obviously a slag's life; in ageing one becomes less seductive, and on that account bitter. One is jealous of the young, and so one hates them. Co...

He sleeps in a foetal position. In his waking hours, he walks with a languorous elegance as if accustomed to living in a liquefied medium. By his movements, one would think that he found air denser to wade through than water. My Art, My Life: An Autobiography  _ Diego Rivera (from the afterward by Freda Kahlo)

"I feel...what? A restlessness.  A feeling to be over the woods at the end of the street and far away, away. And at the same time I have a kind of homesickness for where I am. Is that possible? I have a feeling that something, somewhere has been left unresolved, that some secret thing in the air around me is still waiting to be discovered." SPIES Michael Frayn