As Such a Sudden Gift...

The romantic journey into such blue days - in such conditions, and as such a sudden gift - was, for him, to pass into the brightest sun of happiness, where sparkling light scatters and one seems entirely covered with shining glints.

...

~ The Awkward Age, Jean Paul, 18o4

Netted So Much Light....

There are evenings in spring when the twilight lasts far longer than the astronomically prescribed period. Then a thin smoky mist sinks over the city and gives it the subdued suspense of evenings preceding a holiday. And at the same time it is as if this subdued, pale grey mist had netted so much light that brighter strands remain in it even when it has become quite black and velvety.

...

~ Text: Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers

~ Image: E. Paton, 1919

They Went Slowly....

They went slowly, walking through a landscape expectant in its stillness, and yet which had nothing to expect save the rain and the evening. The sky hung softly over it, sometimes united indissolubly to the earth by a veil of rain, and for them too, wandering through the stillness, there seemed to be nothing left but expectation, and it was as though all the life in them had flowed to their fingers […] Shoulder leaning against shoulder, from the distance resembling the two sides of a triangle, they walked upon the river-path in silence, for neither knew what it was that drew them together.

~ Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers

Glimpsed in Dark Dreams...

“As in the case of archery, there can be no question but that these arts are ceremonies. More clearly than the teacher could express it in words, they tell the pupil that the right frame of mind for the artist is only reached when the preparing and the creating, the technical and the artistic, the material and the spiritual, the project and the object, flow together without break.”

“The completed picture looks just as if the Master had guessed what Nature had glimpsed in dark dreams…”

...

Text: Eugen Herrigel’s The Art of Archery

A Whisper That Dies and Begins Again...

"A mist-like rain spread a blue, tremulous dusk over the garden. The black boughs of the larch, the drooping leafy veil of the birch, the rounded crowns of the beech stood like shadows breathed on a background of gliding mist, while the clipped yew-trees shot upward like the black columns of a roofless temple."

"The stillness was that of a deep grave, save for the raindrops, falling light as thistledown, with a faint, monotonous sound like a whisper that dies and begins again and dies there behind the wet, glistening trunks."

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~ Text: Jens Peter Jacobsen, Marie Grubbe, 1876

~ Images: Harold Sohlberg, A Flowery Meadow in the North, 1905; Prince Eugen, The Forest, 1892

Like a Sudden Invitation...

“If flowers were merely beautiful to the eye, they would still hold their charm; but at times their scent draws us back – like a happy condition of existence, like a sudden invitation – to a deeper sense of life. Whether I’ve sought out these invisible emanations or, more especially, whether they have suddenly happened of their own accord, I accept them as an intense but precarious expression of a spirit whose secret is hidden by the veil of the material world.”

~ Etienne Pivert De Senancour, Obermann, 1833