Quote on age

Photo credit: Seemann from morguefile.com

I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.

~ Madeleine L'Engle

Quote on age

Photo credit: Seemann from morguefile.com

I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.

~ Madeleine L'Engle

Woman In A Garden

Photo credit: guilanenachez from morguefile.com

So much intense shadow — evidence of light —
a darkness overgrown and severely tended
Her dress in this a brilliant beacon, icy green
the skirt still and sumptuous in its painterly arrest
she stands amid twin urns and pedestals, quiet, funereal
above the hedge a head in stone, putto or dead child
You make a room for her in the museum of the garden
your nostalgia for past beauty, the blues of twilight
your ultraviolet periwinkle in undergrowth and sky,
small disturbances amid restful greens, ominous shadow
Only her delicate nape and auburn hair belie a bloodlessness
her face turned away, unaging
chaste, sorrowing, perhaps embarassed
her thoughts fenced by a dark field
we cannot enter or dare not ask.

Red tulips in the foreground full and open, speaking
not granite but caught as much as stone
as lichens inch and die on the framing pediments
Amid confused perspective, incongruent shadow
the rational has no purchase and
a black keyhole gloom at centre
suggests an opening but we are cheated
the flat, unyielding doorway a falsehood
You are locked, a closed off exhibition, private room
secreted from dogmatists, fathers, bullies, idle inquiries
I cannot ask, dare not enter
You invite us in. You explain nothing.

~ Jan Horner
___________________________________________

I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Woman In A Garden

Photo credit: guilanenachez from morguefile.com

So much intense shadow — evidence of light —
a darkness overgrown and severely tended
Her dress in this a brilliant beacon, icy green
the skirt still and sumptuous in its painterly arrest
she stands amid twin urns and pedestals, quiet, funereal
above the hedge a head in stone, putto or dead child
You make a room for her in the museum of the garden
your nostalgia for past beauty, the blues of twilight
your ultraviolet periwinkle in undergrowth and sky,
small disturbances amid restful greens, ominous shadow
Only her delicate nape and auburn hair belie a bloodlessness
her face turned away, unaging
chaste, sorrowing, perhaps embarassed
her thoughts fenced by a dark field
we cannot enter or dare not ask.

Red tulips in the foreground full and open, speaking
not granite but caught as much as stone
as lichens inch and die on the framing pediments
Amid confused perspective, incongruent shadow
the rational has no purchase and
a black keyhole gloom at centre
suggests an opening but we are cheated
the flat, unyielding doorway a falsehood
You are locked, a closed off exhibition, private room
secreted from dogmatists, fathers, bullies, idle inquiries
I cannot ask, dare not enter
You invite us in. You explain nothing.

~ Jan Horner
___________________________________________

I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect. ~ Madeleine L'Engle