Saturday, June 20, 2009

Along These City Streets

                 

















                

"... the city, its mass animating with yellow halo the landscape’s inhuman lack of color. Everything appear in black, gray and white (...). Then the markets, the streets, the squares one after another, exalted by a self-contained radiance, which would sharpen at the cresting of some wall or the gable of a rooftop, while you wondered in vain where the solar source of that light originated.


It was shadowless, that light, not emanating from a distant star but springing just as brightly from here below, from earthly human stone, with those subtle shades, those unexpected shimmerings of a sea shell, a flower or a feather, where light appears to have left its trace delicated imprinted in the material. And you thought: gray goes with the Gothic, red with the Baroque, but with the Romanesque goes yellow; the blond, honeyed, amber, golden stone that the Romanesque, careless or unconscious of its own beauty, like a boy’s rough body, is forever informed by."

             

Luis Cernuda and Stephen Kessler - Written in water

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