Bento's Sketchbook

How is it asking to be altered so as to become less uncouth? You stare at the drawing and repeatedly glance at the seven irises to look, not at their structure this time, but at what is radiating from them, at their energy. How do they interact with the air around them, with the sunshine, with the warmth reflected off the wall of the house?

the introverted category and the extroverted one.

The answer to this question may depend upon what the story has uncovered and revealed, or upon its moral imperative, if it has included one.

And if the story has impressed us, something of these habits, something of its way of giving attention, will remain with us and become our own. We will then apply it to the chaos of ongoing life, in which multitudes of stories are hidden.

And somewhere behind our agreement was the tacit recognition that any original political initiative has to start off as being clandestine, not through a love of secrecy, but because of the innate paranoia of the politically powerful.

both of us were covertly nonconformist and opposed to simplifications.

Vasily Grossman

We were not intimate as natural brothers sometimes are. What was fraternal between us was a certain trust: an existential trust which ultimately derived from a marxist reading of history. Reading or perspective? I would say perspective, for what was essential was another sense of time, which could accommodate both the long term (centuries) and the

Most women, you see, see men as either red or blue.’ She shrugged her frail shoulders. ‘The red ones are easier.’