"Clara became ill. Arriving with the tea tray, the dinner tray, Pattie was silently reproached by eyes which became ever more large and luminously sad." Iris Murdoch, "The Time of the Angels" 🖼️ Ferdinand Hodler, "La Malade" (1914)

"Every now and then the rats cleaned their paws in their whiskers. When they came to the eyes, they scratched them out slowly and licked the eyelids. They bit into the eye as though it was a little egg and chewed it gently, slanting their mouths to suck up the juice." Jean Giono 🖼️ Otto Dix

"J’ai des yeux, de vrais yeux, des yeux vivants, des yeux de flamme, des yeux merveilleux qui vont jusques au fond de l’âme et qui même en bien des cas en peuvent prêter une à ceux qui n’en ont pas" Jules Barbier, after Hoffmann, for Offenbach ⬇️ Robert Wilson's "The Sandman"

Nothing to see here? Well, this is a slow moving 🧵 for #skystorians and others about #eyeglasses of the past, about how to read in the past, where to buy eyeglasses, and how to do with them in general. The hashtag is #HowToDoWithGlassesInThePast Let's roll.

"In vain are our graces, In vain are your eyes. In vain are our graces If love you despise." John Dryden, King Arthur Botticelli, Portrait of a Young Woman

and they are all screaming, and not only are there cataracts in their bulging eyes, but they are all blind, they stand leaning to one side in pieces and corroded from the acids around the collapsed graves, and blindly they scream in the darkness,they scream that this was awaiting them Krasznahorkai

I tried to translate Yourcenar's "Cantilène pour un Flûtiste Aveugle", with no success, except maybe (???) with the last stanza: "And, since your steady cadences Guide the heartbeat of summer nights, Make us believe the sky dances Because a blind man sang just right" 🖼️ Titian? (disputed)

"My eyes are like telescopes I see it all backwards, but who wants hope? If I ever catch that ventriloquist I'll squeeze his head right into my fist" Tom Verlaine, "Friction" 🖼️ Paul Klee, "Ventriloquist and Crier in the Moor"

I'm in the town where the author of Das Passagen-Werk, fearing the Spanish authorities would not grant him passage into Spain, requested passage from Charon instead. The Walter Benjamin memorial monument, aptly titled "Passages" is an underground stairway leading to the sea.

Every transmission tower along the road I'm driving on has a stork nest on top of it. Every single one.

Good morning! Upper-left pic is the view I had for breakfast. The others were taken yesterday in the same place (Albarracín, Spain)

"you fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye" Margaret Atwood (from "Power Politics") 📷 Arthur Hertz, "untitled photo that became the cover art for Mr Bungle's second album Disco Volante

"Now I feel plenty It's only my way of touching What you cannot see Only this is mine Come closer, closer to me I come from far away Where you are not Where are my eyes? There are rings on my fingers But where, where Where are my hands?" Red Crayola, "Former Reflections, Enduring Doubt" 🖼️ M. Ernst

Eyes of Granada.

"The eye: a hand" Attributed to Edouard Manet by Stéphane Mallarmé 🖼️ Victor Brauner, "Composition with a Portrait"

Drop some eyes

Out of William Carlos Williams’s “Prologue to Kora in Hell” (1920): “A poem is tough by no quality it borrows from a logical recital of events nor from the events themselves but solely from that attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken things into a dance giving them thus a full being.”

Since I have managed to take an (underwhelming) cricket shot, I feel authorized to do a hike recap. And no, the cricket pic is not in black and white.

A Tragedy (silk and butterfly wing, 2025)

"[...] a smile which, unlike those seen on the majority of human faces, had no trace in it of irony, save for herself, while for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes, which could not look upon those she loved without yearning to bestow upon them passionate caresses." Proust 🖼️ S. Valadon

Good morning!

Well that was a nice enough day, I think I'll have the same tomorrow.

Your morning image

Eyes of Seville.

Eyes of Barcelona.

"Why are you shooting yourself?" - Archangel Michael, the original bully Note that Gargan was aiming at a bull and, according to this particular depiction or the events, shot himself in the eye, so as far as I'm concerned, this story is where both "bully" and "bull's eye" come from.

One of the first thing I saw while visiting the MNAC in Barcelona this morning was this medieval depiction or St Stephen's stoning, where it appears that one of the stoners dared use something much harder than stone: a three day old baguette.

Did you think eye'd crumble? Did you think eye'd lay down and die? Oh no, not eye! Eye will survive! Mesopotamian, Early Dynastic Period III

"Beginning to wish that you never met The girl with the far-away look in her eyes But to your surprise, she pours you some tea How many lumps, is it two, one or five?" Family, "Never Like This" Lilla Cabot Perry, "A Cup of Tea"

"I shall be cried up to be a beauty; and what then? Then I shall have all eyes stare upon me; and what am I the better, unless their eyes could infuse in my brain, wit and understanding? Their eyes cannot enrich me with knowledge, nor give me the light of truth" Margaret Cavendish, "The Contract"

Son io medesmo, that’s the base For understanding how My sound was muddled through a chase That turned into a row. I lack that key je ne sais quoi That carries with it hope. A voiceless surd, a sentient schwa, I hear a cosmic “Nope.”

I know everyone is always wondering what it would look like if the Mediterranean sea was in the western hemisphere, so I made this map.

Today I'm: Taking White Horse Mountain (by Endurance)

"I became thus indifferent to others. And my eyes also decline appeals for compassion, and, void themselves, know how to plunge into emptiness, and touch with a passing glance the vaguest passers-by." Émile Hennequin / Stuart Merrill, "The Quest" 🖼️ Anders Zorn, "Omnibus"

CAVARADOSSI 🎵[...] Qual altro al mondo può star di paro all'occhio tuo nero?🎵 TOSCA 🎵Oh, come la sai bene l'arte di farti amare! Ma, falle gli occhi neri!🎵 Luigi Illica, "Tosca" 🖼️ Augustus John, portrait of the Marquesa Luisa Casati

"Hyblaean honey, mixed with goat gall Cures the eyes oppressed by sinister darkness. The juice from chewed betony will dry out the eyes. If lazy old age obscures the eyes, Ablutions made with fennel sap and liquid honey Will help, as will black vulture gall In which celandine seeds were ground."

"Yesterday a great deal might have been seen — a great deal. To-day even dreams shun the eye of mortal man." Turgenev, "Phantoms" (Tr. Isabel Florence Hapgood) 🖼️ Gauguin, "Madame la Mort"

"The cat inspects: the whole of the night. Some houses have shimmering panels of stained glass in their windows. The cat lies down on one of the house's steps. Before him the Void comes back. His eyes become very wide, he sees into nothingness!" Mireille Havet, "The House in the Eyes of the Cat"

Today's hike will include one of those trails that bear the hyperbolic moniker of "vertical kilometer". It is 2.9km long and has an elevation gain of 1km. These numbers alone may fail to give you a good sense of how steep it is, so I made an at-scale graph using Manhattan's 5th avenue as the x-axis.

"Big eyes I keep falling for those Big eyes They keep calling my name Big eyes I keep falling for those Big eyes They keep calling my name" Cheap Trick, "Big Eyes" 🖼️ Sofonisba Anguissola – portrait of her sister Minerva or maybe of herself

"The heart, whose music masks the creaking of the entrails drying out for lack of any tear reaching them from eyes that, being fixated on seeing, no longer weep; pure crystal, pure retina. [...] Therefore eyes that do not weep are mistaken." María Zambrano, "El Hombre y lo Divino" ⬇️ Pinson

I hear it's International Owl Awareness Day so here's an owl deserving of your praise: the owl who could not be tempted. I can't figure out wether the rabbit and the lizard are trying to help the owl or not. Given that the painting is not based on any popular tale, I guess well never know.

Here's my unsolicited translation of "L'Isolement", a 13-quatrain poem by Alphonse de Lamartine. I chose not to alter the metre (french alexandrine) nor the rhyme scheme. (1/2)

If you see this post a castle

"She [...] formed the idolatrous habit of kneeling in front of the parrot to say her prayers. Sometimes the sun shone in at the attic window and caught his glass eye, and a great luminous ray shot out of it and put her in an ecstasy." Flaubert, "A Simple Heart" 🖼️ Rubens

Yarrow's Spiny Lizard (Sceleporus jarrovii), Arizona. See the parietal eye? This third eye has a lens, cornea, & retina, but is not for image-forming. It senses light/dark to help regulate circadian rhythms, and may help the lizard avoid predators & assist with sense of direction. 🦎 #reptiles 👁️👁️👁️

Oxen that rattle the yoke or halt in the shade, what is that you express in your eyes?

"If man didn’t sometimes sovereignly close his eyes, he would end up no longer seeing what is worth being looked at." René Char Translation Cid Corman 🗿René Magritte, "The Future of Statues"

Almost nothing remains of it, but the first chapel built on this spot was built 990 years ago. The current chapel was built in the 17th century and has since undergone flagrant renovations.

"The eyes alone are still capable of uttering a cry." René Char, translated by Cid Corman 🖼️ Edvard Munch (you know the one)