The camera is an instrument of transformation. It can make what it sees more beautiful, more gruesome, milder, darker, all the while insisting on the plain reality of its depiction.

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 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?

We got ready and showed our home. The visitor thought: you live well. The slum must be inside you.

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.

Even when the end is certain, the days must be lived, and little can be done to hurry things along.

“Every life is in many days, day after day,” Joyce wrote in Ulysses,

I dreamt that I had sketched piano keys out on the kitchen table. I played on them, without a sound. Neighbors came by to listen. —from “Grief Gondola #2”

The music you travel with helps you to create your own internal weather.