Known and Strange Things

We enjoy, with him, the satisfactions of coincidences, and (to put it as he might) of dreaming of pasts in which we dreamed of the future from which we are now dreaming of the past.

The images with which Tranströmer charges his poems bring to mind the concept of acheiropoieta, “making without hands”; in Byzantine art, acheiropoietic images were those believed to have come miraculously into being without a painter’s intervention. The Shroud of Turin and the Veil of Veronica are the most famous examples.

The victim, by continuing to suffer, irritates the oppressor, who would rather be already past it.

Doran highlighted the political aspect of the play, and this was to the good, for it is still necessary to insist on Africa as a site of political and ideological contest, and not a static place mired in an unchanging anthropological past.

Of the five traditional senses, touch is the only one that is reflexive: one can look without being seen, and hear without being heard, but to touch is to be touched. It is a sense that goes both ways: the sensitivity of one’s skin responds to and is responded to by the sensitivity of other people’s skin.

The term “at home” describes both a location and a state of being. You can stay at home or feel at home, and often those two notions coincide. But what about when they don’t?

infelicities

Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs.

An image depends radically on context, on how it is placed but also on who is looking at it.

FEW THINGS ARE more mysterious than someone else’s favorite film. To hear it named is to be puzzled. You appreciate its merits but not how it can be preferable to all others. Perhaps your favorite film isn’t the one that you like best but the one that likes you best. It confirms you on first encounter, and goes on to shape you in some irreversible