'...what more does one want but a room, materials, and the National Gallery?
On the whole I am awfully pleased with my existence. I live almost spiritually, looking down with a cynical smile at all the petty little worries of mankind, for I feel that I gracefully float above all these, touching only what is beautiful and worthy. When I look at other men and see what are their worries, their ambitions, their outlooks, I feel that they have in life got hold of the "wrong end of the stick" and that I am really in a way a superman, for in order to be happy they seek unworthy and impossible things whilst I can go out and thrill with happiness over a tree, a blade of grass, a cloud, a child, an onion, any part of nature's innocent work. Have I not the advantage?'

- from a letter by Mark Gertler to William Rothstein (c.1910).

Picture: 'Still Life with Self Portrait' by Mark Gertler (1918).

Nothing is more mysterious than the 'seizure' of a personality by a work of art. A work of any of the arts, which may have been familiar for years, suddenly, like an act of focusing, falls into place. Becoming lucent, intelligible - extra dimensional? Whatever phrase you like, but the person to whom it happens is in a state of enlarged being; at the top of their powers, but in tranquility. An experience not of strangeness but of intimacy. 'At that instant her mind was ennobled in Islam' as it was said of the woman in the Arabian Nights.

- Mary Butts (The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns, 1937).

Picture: 'In the Hold' by David Bomberg (1913-14).

By what chance, or worse what law of the universe was she set there in the road to power and success, unbreakable yet tormenting with the need to conquer and break? ... Those nights of imagined copulation, when one thought not of love nor sensation nor comfort nor triumph, but of torture rather, the very rhythm of the body reinforced by hissed ejaculations - take that and that! That for your pursed mouth and that for your pink patches, your closed knees, your impregnable balance on the high, female shoes - and that if it kills you for your magic and your isled virtue!

- William Golding (Pincher Martin, 1956).

Picture: 'Homme et Femme' by Félix Vallotton (1913).

'There was more life about the place, and less.'

- Mary Butts (The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns, 1937).

Picture: 'La Baiser en Pincettes' by Charles Maurin (c.1910).

'The crown of petals is the flower's panties. Rip them off and you will have public indecency. They were the pre-adamic fig leaf of nature before the first Eve wore that leaf as her own crown of petals.'

- Malcolm de Chazal (Sens-Plastique, 1948).

Picture: Azorina vidalii (Glockenblume/Bell-flower) with and without petals by Karl Blossfeldt from the second series of 'Art Forms in Nature' (1932).

   The hermit had taken up his quarters in the wooded region, so well hidden that what they call a stroke of luck was necessary in order to find him. But I say that this stroke of luck is none other than identification, you can only find the hermit by suffering his solitude, the movement is unique, produced by a single mechanism. And that is the illusion.

   Miaille listened to these simple words and accepted another drink that the other man poured for him.
   The number two, the most imperfect of all.
   And the notion of a homeland is dwindling, any sort of identification has become impossible.
   Unless the hermit himself cultivates it, warped by his sorrow, and welcomes the exile as his double, everything would have to start anew, go from division to division, and culminate in the mortal number, one plus one equals nothingness.

- Robert Pinget (Fable, 1971).

Picture: 1911 set design by Leon Bakst for Mansion (act) Four 'The Wounded Laurel' from 'Le Martyre de saint Sébastien' by Claude Debussy and Gabriele d'Annunzio.

'My mind will be a treasure-house of art, swept and garnished and strong and at its best.'

- Mary MacLane (I Await the Devil's Coming, 1902).

Picture: "Art Lover" cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post by Stevan Dohanos (3rd March 1956).

“Is the spring coming?” he said. “What is it like?…”

“It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine…”

- Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden, 1911).

Picture: "Rain in Britain" by Maurice Denis (1889).

On Easter Monday young men used to raid the homes of their chosen girls and duck them (no less) in ponds or wells. In the cities water was replaced with a deluge of scent. The girl had to respond with a gift of a carnation; and debonair lads paraded the evening streets sporting several.

- Joseph Macleod (The Sisters d'Aranyi, 1969)

Picture: "Carnation and Cloth of Gold" by Salvador Dali (1950).

Girl of Carnations by Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso (1913)

Simon George by Hans Holbein the Younger (c.1533)

"One day, as I viewed the faded portrait of a young girl in an album, someone passed who spoke a name...

"And so I knew you; having heard your name, you, I shall dream of you."

- Edourard Dujardin (Antonia, 1891).

Picture: My photo detail of Jelly d'Aranyi from a photo of the three d'Aranyi sisters.

‎"If you are on your own for a long time and get used to being alone and are more or less trained in loneliness, then you begin to discover more and more in places which, for normal people, are essentially bare. On the wall you discover cracks, fine cracks, uneven patches, vermin. There is a tremendous movement on the walls. In actual fact the wall and the page of a book completely resemble one another."

- Thomas Bernhard (Three Days, in The Italians, 1972).

Picture: "The Wall" by Yevgeny Rukhin (1962-63).


Words etched in Russian read "Sasha is a jerk" and "Prick"

"Masculinity and femininity, as they are usually understood, are obstacles to humanity¹ [...] Only a gentle masculinity, only an autonomous femininity are right, true and beautiful. And if this is so, one must not further exaggerate the character of the sex in any way [...] but rather seek to soften it by means of counter-measures, so that everyone in what is proper to him or her, is able to find a space as boundless as possible in which to move freely, according to pleasure and love, in the entire sphere of humanity"

- Friedrich Schlegel (On Philosophy - To Dorothea. An open letter to Brendel Veit in Volume 2 (1) of his Athenaeum journal, 1799).

Picture: "Penthésilée – Pentesiléia" by Raul Ubac (1937).
(Penthesilea was the Amazon Queen who went to die in the Trojan war after killing Hippolyta)

1. This first part of the quote is widely attributed online to Karoline von Günderrode, pretty much wherever her name is mentioned, from Wikipedia onwards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoline_von_Günderrode). Whilst the idea would no doubt fit her writing I can find no evidence in my books or online that she actually wrote it, and those that quote it do not indicate a source. I am certain, on the other hand, though that Schlegel committed the lines to paper in the place cited. I have a correction/query pending with Wikipedia etc but if anyone happens to have a better knowledge of Karoline von Günderrode's work and can set me straight then please do. Till then I am chalking it up as another in my win column in the battle of Me v Internet.

"do I write intelligable I am genneraly understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc and for the very reason that altho they are drilled hourly daily and weekly by every boarding school Miss who pretends to gossip in correspondence… Those who have made grammar up into a system and cut it into classes and orders as the student does the animal or vegetable creation may be a fine recreation for schools but it becomes of no use towards making any one so far acquainted with it as to find it useful—it will only serve to puzzle and mislead to awe and intimidate instead of aiding and encouraging him therefore it pays nothing for the study"

- John Clare (quoted in Jeffrey Robinson’s "Romantic Presences").

Picture: Page from Timothy Dexter's "A Pickle for the Knowing Ones; or Plain Truth in a Homespun Dress" (1848). Dexter's book contained no punctuation, and when people complained about the lack he added an extra page of punctuation marks and instructed readers to “peper and solt it as they plese”.

"I longed for more books and fewer tasks to occupy me."

- Anna Luisa Karsch (Autobiographical Letter to Professor Sulzer, 1st Sept, 1762)

Picture: "Woman Reading Under A Lamp" lithograph by József Rippl-Rónai commissioned by Sigefried Bing for the August 1894 issue of La Revue Blanche.

"Mlle de Bauret had a taste for literature and the arts, but her literary knowledge only began with the end of the nineteenth century - in other words it was non-existent. She saw and judged the world through the pet theories of a few fashionable authors: for example, she honestly believed that every man had been in love with his mother as a child, and if someone confessed to her that he had been tempted to push a stranger under a tram, she would say to him: 'You've been reading too much Gide' - at which her companion would stare at her blankly, having never heard of the author of Les Nourritures Terestres. She proclaimed a cinema clown called Charlie Chaplin a genius. When she lapsed in to reverie, she called it an 'interior monologue'. When M. de Coantré told her that Uncle Octave was reluctant to face reality, she translated it into her jargon thus: 'He is taking refuge in escapism.' And so on. This infantilism of mind gave her, at the age of twenty-five, the same sort of silliness as a sixteen-year-old who enters the class of philosophy and discovers the human mind and soul through the manuals of M. Paulin Malapert. In politics, needless to say, Mlle de Bauret had progressive ideas.
Mlle de Bauret's real failing, which was partly the failing of her age and partly of the period in which she lived, was that she regarded novelty as synonymous with value. This is a sure sign of barbarism: in any society, it is always the people with the lowest intelligence who long to be 'in the swim'. Incapable of assessing anything by thier own taste, culture and discrimination, they automatically judge a problem in accordance with the principle that what is new is true."

- Henry de Montherlant (The Bachelors, 1934).

Picture: "Amusement" by Kees van Dongen (1914).

"Some people assume that in addition to the great original betrayal a small particular betrayal has been contrived in every case exclusively for them, that, in other words, when a love drama is being performed on the stage the leading actor has not only a pretended smile for their lover, but also a special crafty smile for one particular spectator at the back of the gallery. This is going too far."

- Franz Kafka (Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way).

Picture: "Box Seats at the Theater, the Gentleman and the Lady" by Felix Vallotton (1909).

‎"It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh."

- Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust).

Picture: "Confesiones De Año Nuevo" by Ivonne Gargano (2010).

"There ought to be books for sleeping: in the most vicious style, with barely chewable words, long as fingers, words that twirl into incomprehensible silver curlicues at the end; consonantal knickknackeries (or at most an occasional dark vowel in): books to fight thoughts."

- Arno Schmidt

Picture: "Pietje Op Boeren Stoel" by Suze Robertson (1857-1922).

"I recognise in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty"
- Jean Genet

Picture: "Enrapture Scene Two - Escape" by Mark Stock (2001)

There are even single-word poems, or single words that ought to be poems; the best one I know of is the Tierra del Fuegan word “mamihlapinatapei”.

- John Barth, (A Few Words About Minimalism)

Mamihlapinatapei - a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that they both desire but which neither one wants to start.

Picture: Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in "Flesh and The Devil" (1926).