Showing posts with label Calvino. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Calvino. Show all posts

Monday, June 02, 2008

The Paris Papers: Part Four

Vale, Yves Saint-Laurent (1936-2008)




Raoul Dufy (1887-1953) - The Eiffel Tower, 1935


Leaving there and proceeding for three days toward the east, you reach Diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead, a crystal theatre, a golden cock that crows each morning on a tower. All these beauties will already be familiar to the visitor, who has seen them also in other cities. But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicoloured lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman's voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and think they were happy, that time.

Italo Calvino ('Cities & Memory', Invisible Cities)


Musique Du Jour: La Vie en Rose, Grace Jones



Friday, January 19, 2007

Commedia Dell'Agonia




Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) - Gilles, c. 1718-19


"Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness."

Italo Calvino

"Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad."

Victor Hugo

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is part of ourselves. We must die to one life before we can enter another."

Anatole France

"One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad and indifferent: e.g. music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf."

Baruch Spinoza

"Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits."

Susan Sontag