I hope you will like today's selections -- a few photos; a little art; a couple of poems. You will find they all go down fairly painlessly, I think. :-) (Note: I have worked long and pretty hard on the formatting of this page. It works in my browser. I can only hope that it works in yours.)
Looking
My three daily "visual" sites have combined to hit a triple today.
First, at Pet of the Day, we have Trixie, an apparently very loving house rabbit. I myself am rather attracted to the idea of adopting a rescued house rabbit, since I am unable to adopt another cat. If you wish to learn more about house rabbits, this page provides a link to the House Rabbit Society.
Next, at Earth Science Picture of the Day, we have the Grand Canyon, "one of the most spectacular examples of erosion in the world," as the editor notes.
Moving steadilly outward, at the Astronomy Picture of the Day is this marvelous photo of the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit. I remember the tremendous promises that were made for the Hubble before it was launched in 1990. It suffered, however, from various problems and was something of a disappointment until 1993, when it was serviced and repaired. Since then it has more than fulfilled its promise -- spectacular photos, day after day, of earth, other planets, stars, and galaxies. Truly a marvel of our age.
Art for Today The Flemish painter David Teniers the younger (1610-1690) was the court painter for Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, and simultaneously keeper of the Archducal collection of paintings. Combining both these roles, Teniers painted a series of pictures of the art gallery itself, filled with numerous little miniature renderings of the works belonging to the Archduke. (Perhaps this was a means of keeping an "inventory" of the collection?) Here are links to four of those paintings. To differentiate the paintings one from the other, look closely at the room itself; the paintings; the people; and -- the pets. They are all different from one to another!
The Gallery of Archduke Leopold in Brussels, 1639. An orderly room, with a window on the left; huge painting of people on a staircase on the right; four people in a group, plus two separate people; and one dog. The Gallery of Archduke Leopold in Brussels, 1640. A window with an oval painting, and a timbered ceiling; three men; a dog chasing a cat! The Gallery of Archduke Leopold in Brussels, 1641. A somewhat crude-appearing picture; a fireplace on the left; three people; two dogs. The Visit of Archduke Leopold to His Gallery, ca. 1647. The most "formal" of the series. A formal "room"; a "recess" at the center; five people, mostly in formal dress; two dogs. (The man wearing a hat is, I believe, the archduke.)
Teniers was also known for his scenes of peasant and village life. Peasants Merry-making, ca. 1650, is one of the best of these. Among other virtues, it depicts a bagpiper!
Note: For a somewhat different, and in some ways easier, viewing experience, go to the Web Gallery's thumbnails page, click on a thumbnail, and you will be presented with the painting seen through a special viewer, enabling you to increase or decrease the size of the painting to fit your screen.
Reading
Over at Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, there is an amusing limerick by that incomparable writer of limericks, Anonymous:
A wanton young lady of Wimley
Reproached for not acting primly,
Answered: "Heavens above!
I know sex isn't love,
But it's such an attractive facsimile."
On a more serious note, I feel there is much truth in this contribution from Nigel Andrew:
In childhood it's easy to feel
The eternal suffusing the real,
But as the beholder
Gets steadily older,
It doesn't seem such a big deal.
Oddly enough, that limerick dovetails very nicely with Bartleby Daily's observation that today marks the birthday of English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892). Tennyson was the most famous poet of the Victorian age, and a profound spokesman for the ideas and values of his times.
I tend to prefer Tennyson's shorter poems, a number of which have to do with aging and mortality. You can find three of these -- "Break, Break, Break," "Crossing the Bar," and "Ulysses" -- in the Harvard Classics, also on line at Bartleby.
More reading
It quite fascinates me that Andrew, author of the second limerick given above, has made in a humorous way much the same point William Wordsworth makes in his famous poem Intimations of Immortality. The opening lines say nearly the exact same thing:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore; --
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.A bit further down are my favorite lines, which I was thrilled to hear quoted by the minister-father in the film A River Runs Through It:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home . . .
More, more, more reading In compiling the above, I used two reference workds which also constitute two more illustrations of what is so fantastic about the World Wide Web:
Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250-1900, chosen and edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch, 1919. The Harvard Classics and Shelf of Fiction, ed. by Charles W. Eliot. The latter is comprised of a 50-volume 5-foot shelf of books and the the 20-volume shelf of fiction. It is said to be the "most comprehensive and well-researched anthology of all time . . . . [covering] every major literary figure, philosopher, religion, folklore and historical subject through the twentieth century."
Imagine -- all this for free! (And not just for free, but you don't have to find the shelfspace for them. And not alone that, but you won't have to dust them either.)
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