The Kiss, 1955 by Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
The Kiss, 1971 by Richard Lindner (1901-1978)
The Kiss, 1904 by Clarence White (1871-1925)
The Kiss, 2002 by Odd Nerdrum (b. 1944)
Barad-dûr: The Fortress of Sauron, c. 1944 by J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973).
From The Morgan Library & Museum’s exhibition “Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth.”
Anchises Lost, 2009 by F. Scott Hess (b. 1955)
Judith sees the Head of the Lion, 1908 by Thomas Theodor Heine (1867-1948)
Birmingham Totem, 1964 by Charles White (1918-1979)
Divine State, 2012 by Jia Aili (b. 1979)
Eclipse 2, 2018 by Tilo Baumgärtel (b. 1972)
“The Witness”
by
Jorge Luis Borges
English translation by Andrew Hurley
In a stable that stands almost in the shadow of the new stone church, a man with gray eyes and gray beard, lying amid the odor of the animals, humbly tries to will himself into death, much as a man might will himself to sleep. The day, obedient to vast and secret laws, slowly shifts about and mingles the shadows in the lowly place; outside lie plowed fields, a ditch clogged with dead leaves, and the faint track of a wolf in the black clay where the line of woods begins. The man sleeps and dreams, forgotten.
The bells for orisons awaken him. Bells are now one of evening’s customs in the kingdoms of England, but as a boy the man has seen the face of Woden, the sacred horror and the exultation, the clumsy wooden idol laden with Roman coins and ponderous vestments, the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and prisoners. Before dawn he will be dead, and with him, the last eyewitness images of pagan rites will perish, never to be seen again. The world will be a little poorer when this Saxon man is dead.
Things, events, that occupy space yet come to an end when someone dies may make us stop in wonder—and yet one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man’s or woman’s death, unless the universe itself has a memory, as theosophists have suggested. In the course of time there was one day that closed the last eyes that had looked on Christ; the Battle of Junin and the love of Helen died with the death of one man. What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonia Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?
Interior Strandgade 30, 1901 by Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916)
The Falconer, 2011 by Jansson Stegner (b. 1972)
Daniela on David’s Récamière, 1974 by Paul Wunderlich (1927-2010)
Dancer I, 2017 by Natalie Frank (b. 1980)
Germinal, 2013 by Rosa Loy (b. 1958)
Biblioklept 