FOR RENT: / An Empty Sky

The world is slow to dissolve and leave us.

Matthea Harvey, Sad Little Breathing Machine

nah bro, you live in a society, i live in a homoerotic victorian romance novel

we have / bartered away heaven, / in starry nights, in the apple / orchards of Paradise.

- Marina Tsvetaeva, We shall not escape Hell tr. Elaine Feinstein

There is a solitude in this world

I cannot pierce. I would die for it.

- Ada Limón, Drowning Creek

in that largeness of heart, that capacity for feeling and desire and passion, there's some kind of holiness.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

Portrait Bust of a Woman (detail), Roman, Antonine Period, 140-150 AD

Photo by Erika Dufour

theories which isolate art and its appreciation by placing them in a realm of their own, disconnected from other modes of experiencing, are not inherent in the subject-matter, but arise because of specifiable extraneous conditions. […] Theory can start with and from acknowledged works of art only when the esthetic is already compartmentalized, or only when works of art are set in a niche apart instead of being celebrations, recognized as such, of the things of ordinary experience. Even a crude experience, if authentically an experience, is more fit to give a clue to the intrinsic nature of esthetic experience than is an object already set apart from any other mode of experience.

- John Dewey, Art as Experience

Look how much sadness you can make from showing sadness restrained.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

the smoke / carries my longing / - to Heaven

Barbara Brandys, By the Fire tr. Regina Grol