Pasadena (Calif.) Audubon Society, “Teaching Children To Love The Birds” (ca. 1922)
He gathered together a few shillings and wired them to Trieste; on Christmas eve John Joyce produced a few more to wire to Nora, quoting Vergil almost accurately, “Non ignara malorum miseris succurrere disco.”*
*“Having suffered myself, I know how to help those in trouble.”
— Richard Ellmann, James Joyce
Left: Nationaal Archief, “Youngsters having a good time” (1961)
Right: Joseph B. Bergstresser, “Unidentified group playing cards” (ca. 1860-1900)
photograph by John Sapiro
Entering the Thimble Shoal Channel Tunnel, March, 1985
Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.
— Melville, Moby Dick
Stephen Schwartz Performs “Corner of the Sky”
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
— The Great Gatsby
Jim Matchinga, “Roots” (Cincinnati Magazine, 1980)
Now this interconnection or adaptation of all created things to each and of each to all, means that each simple substance has relations which express all the others, and, consequently, that it is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.
— Leibniz, The Monadology
“Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” by Marvin Gaye
cf. G. W. Thorne/London Stereoscopic Company, “The Bashful Lover” (hand-colored) (ca. 1860-1870)
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself…
— Clement Clarke Moore, A Visit from St. Nicholas
“Cool Yule” by Louis Armstrong
A great dog.
Oh, how I wish we were back on the road again…
“Me And You And A Dog Named Boo” by Lobo
cf. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, “Man sitting with dog on front porch as woman looks through door…” (between 1860 and 1930)
“Move It On Over” — George Thorogood and the Destroyers
Billy Rose Theatre Division, “Harvest” (1913)
Newman uttered one of the least attenuated imprecations that had ever passed his lips…
—Henry James, The American
Dick Swanson, “Artist On Bank Of The Schuylkill River” (1973)
I think that if I can get into the habit of writing a little about what happens, or rather doesn’t happen, I may lose a little of the sense of loneliness and desolation which abides with me. My circumstances allowing of nothing but the ejaculation of one-syllabled reflections, a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself, may have its yet to be discovered consolations. I shall at least have it all my own way and it may bring relief as an outlet to that geyser of emotions, sensations, speculations and reflections…so here goes, my first Journal!
—Diary of Alice James, May 31, 1889
“Everything Else” – Jennifer Damiano
The Finnish Museum of Photography, “The counter of a café at the new Centrum department store of Voima cooperative.” (detail) (1961)
What passion hangs these weights upon my tongue?
I cannot speak to her, yet she urged conference.
O poor Orlando! Thou art overthrown.
—As You Like It
“Magnet and Steel” – Walter Egan
Missouri Historical Society, “Capturing the City: Photographs from the Streets of St. Louis, 1900–1930 — Strand Motion Picture Theater entrance at 419 North Sixth Street featuring advertisement for the movie “Bootles’ Baby,” 1915. The large colorful poster catches the attention of the woman passing at far right.” (detail)
Darling, I’ve nearly sat it off in the Strand to-day and all because W.E. Lawrence of the Movies is your physical counter-part. So I was informed by half a dozen girls before I could slam on a hat and see for myself—He made me so homesick…
—letter from Zelda Fitzgerald to F. Scott Fitzgerald, March, 1919
cf. The Finnish Museum of Photography, “Osuustukkukaupan osasto Elintarvikemessuilla Messuhallissa.” (1950) (edited detail)
Frances Benjamin Johnston, “2 scenes from Pastoral Plays: Strephon casts off Chloe” (1906)
Left: Underwood & Underwood, “…a country farm-yard in Ireland” (ca. 1903)
Right: L.M. Melander & Bro., “Another button off” (ca. 1875)
Jack Corn, “The Cool Morning Air Condenses a Boy’s Breath as He Walks Along a Coal Car on His Way to School…” (1974)
“Nay, if I mistake not, unity itself divided by zero equals infinity.”
—Thomas Carlyle
Photograph by Guy Sapiro (1962-2009)
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
—Emily Dickinson
cf. photograph by Alice Moore via Unsplash
“You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist’s nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs.”
—Proust, Swann’s Way
Kenneth W. Williams, “What’s This?” (ca. 1938)
Photograph by Skitterphoto via Pixabay
“…follow the path your genius traces like the galaxy of heaven for you to walk in.”
—Emerson, Greatness
Lons Ramsdell, “School’s Out” (Home Movies Magazine, 1950)
John Dillwyn Llewelyn, The Upper Fall (1853–56)
I dwell in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago,
And left no trace but the cellar walls,
And a cellar in which the daylight falls,
And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow…
–Robert Frost, Ghost House
cf. Photograph by Arnel Hasanovic via Unsplash
‘Tis almost morning; I would have thee gone…
—Romeo and Juliet
Dance you into daylight…
“Rock With You” • The Reflex Re√ision by The Reflex
Ernst Halberstadt, “Commonwealth Avenue between Arlington and Berkeley Streets” (1973)
The season’s final blossoms bring
More dear delight than buds of spring.
They stir in us a live communion
Of sorrowfully poignant dreams.
Thus oft the hour of parting seems
More vivid than a sweet reunion.
—Aleksandr Pushkin
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, “Playing baseball…” (ca. 1910)
“Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” by The Police
Lejaren à Hiller, Fatima Cigarettes advertisement (ca. 1922)
…is it not Tennyson who has said: ‘Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have lost at all?
—Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh
State Library of New South Wales, “Snapshot at fern tree near Hobart prior to departure south” (1911)
Wil Blanche, “Springtime Scene…” (1973)
William B., “Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) Construction…” (detail) (1900)
Carol M. Highsmith, “Melodrama performance…” (detail)
CHAPTER XXXIX: Mr. Samuel Weller, being entrusted with a mission of love, proceeds to execute it; with what success will hereinafter appear…
–Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
I Know A Little (Album Version) by Lynyrd Skynyrd
Keystone View Company, “In Olden Times…the Stork Would Bring a Baby Sweet and Fair” (1907)
“Out of the cradle endlessly rocking…”
—Walt Whitman
Seven Thirty Seven comin’ out of the sky
Oh! Won’t you take me down to Memphis on a midnight ride,
I wanna move…
Travelin’ Band – Creedence Clearwater Revival
cf. Samuel H. Gottscho, New York World’s Fair, Entrance to Perisphere (1939)
Tom Hubbard, At the Tyler Davidson Fountain, in Fountain Square Downtown Cincinnati’s Popular Public Plaza, a Young Man Listens to the Radio with One Ear, Play of the Water with the Other (August, 1973)
Lyddell Sawyer, “In The Twilight” (1888)
Courtesy of Michael Kravitz
The spider’s touch, how exquisitely fine!
Feels at each thread, and lives along the line…
—Alexander Pope, Epistle I—Of the Nature and State of Man, with Respect to the Universe
Nicolas Vigier, pinball (detail) (2009)
cf. Henrique Pinto, Yellow cab (2008)
A rainy day in Paris, August, 1984
Geo. R. Lawrence Co., “A tourist sleeper musical” (ca. 1905)
I don’t know where we went wrong
But the feeling’s gone
And I just can’t get it back…
cf. R. Dührkoop, “The Difficult Letter” (ca. 1908)
Charles O’Rear, Las Vegas street scene (1972)
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
–William Wordsworth
One time a thing occurred to me…
But if your heart,
Your heart has been broken
And you don’t wear it on your sleeve
No one can tell,
Your hell goes unspoken
But there’s one thing you must believe…
Untitled photograph by R. E. Scaife (ca. 1919)
At The Louvre, August, 1984
Such dim-conceivèd glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time—with a billowy main—
A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.
–John Keats, On Seeing the Elgin Marbles (excerpt)
You slept all night now it’s morning time
That’s the time to rise and shine
Don’t you cry and don’t be blue
Wakin’ up is hard to do!
A. L. Hitchin, “You’ve Waked Me Too Soon” (ca. 1914)
Carol M. Highsmith, A depiction of an old roadside diner… (detail) (2014)
Börje Gallén, Woman and children feeding pigeons in Copenhagen in 1946 (1946)
“One time as [Saint Francis] was passing through the Spoleto valley, he came upon a place near Bevagna, in which a great multitude of birds of various kinds had assembled. When the holy one of God saw them, because of the outstanding love of the Creator with which he loved all creatures, he ran swiftly to the place. He greeted them in his usual way, as if they shared in reason. As the birds did not take flight, he went to them, going to and fro among them, touching their heads and bodies with his tunic…”
—Thomas of Celano, The Treatise on the Miracle of Saint Francis (The Francis Trilogy of Thomas of Celano, New City Press, 2004)
Börje Gallén, Fisherman and boy in Smygehuk (detail) (1954)
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world “This was a man!”
—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
cf. Burk Uzzle, Broad Street, Philadelphia (1981)
David Falconer, After a long winter without having a smiling service station operator… (1974)
Arthur S.Siegel, Jitterbug dancing… (detail) (1942)
Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc., Seagram Building, New York City. Night shot (between 1940 and 1950?)
cf. Carol M. Highsmith, Ominous clouds above Pine Bluffs… (2015)
Nat remarked upon it when hedging was finished for the day. “Yes,” said the farmer, “there are more birds about than usual; I’ve noticed it too. And daring, some of them, taking no notice of the tractor. One or two gulls came so close to my head this afternoon I thought they’d knock my cap off! As it was, I could scarcely see what I was doing when they were overhead and I had the sun in my eyes. I have a notion the weather will change. It will be a hard winter. That’s why the birds are restless.”
—Daphne du Maurier, The Birds
Lewis Hine, Bedroom and living-room in company-owned home of workers in Highland Cotton Mills… (1936)
The Ladies’ Home Journal (1948)
The U.S. National Archives, A Youngster, Clutching His Soldier Father, Gazes Upward While the Latter Lifts His Wife from the Ground to Wish Her a “Merry Christmas” (December, 1944)
Jack Delano, In the waiting room of the Union Station (detail) (1943)
Museum of Hartlepool, A Helping Hand
“I wonder if you ever read Dickens’ Christmas books?…I have only read two of them yet, and feel so good after them and would do anything, yes and shall do everything, to make it a little better for people. I wish I could lose no time; I want to go out and comfort some one…”
—Letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to Mrs. Sitwell (September, 1874)
Flip Schulke, Female Road Worker Directs Traffic… (ca. 1975)
Charles O’Rear, Passengers view the scenery… (1974)
I know her not! Her hand has been in mine,
And the warm pressure of her taper arm
Has thrill’d upon my fingers, and the hem
Of her white dress has lain upon my feet,
Till my hush’d pulse, by the caressing folds,
Was kindled to a fever! I, to her,
Am but the undistinguishable leaf
Blown by upon the breeze — yet I have sat,
And in the blue depths of her stainless eyes,
(Close as a lover in his hour of bliss,
And steadfastly as look the twin stars down
Into unfathomable wells,) have gazed!
And I have felt from out its gate of pearl
Her warm breath on my cheek, and while she sat
Dreaming away the moments, I have tried
To count the long dark lashes in the fringe
Of her bewildering eyes! The kerchief sweet
That enviably visits her red lip
Has slumber’d, while she held it, on my knee, —
And her small foot has crept between mine own —
And yet, she knows me not!…
—Nathaniel Parker Willis, The Lady in the White Dress, Whom I Helped Into the Omnibus
It’s got what it takes
So tell me why can’t this be love?
Frances Benjamin Johnston, Passengers waiting to board a freighter… (detail) (1903)
Frances Benjamin Johnston, Unidentified house. Iris along pathway (glass lantern slide, hand-colored) (between 1910 and 1935)
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee…
—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Where is the light from yesterday?
When you and I were unafraid
And lost inside a world we made…
Frances Benjamin Johnston, Looking down Midway after a rain, Louisiana Purchase Exposition (ca. 1904)
You’re gonna make it after all…
Eugène Atget, Terrasse de Café (Café Terrace) (1899-1900) (detail)
Mark Cohen, Untitled (girls’ faces flashed in bus window)
Tom Hubbard, “…Saturday Night Rendezvous” (detail) (1973)
Missing one angel child
‘Cause you’re here with me right now…
Baron Adolph de Meyer, Glass and shadows (1912)
Sending you forget me nots
To help you to remember…
Frances Benjamin Johnston, Willard Hotel – dining room (between 1901 and 1910)
cf. State Library and Archives of Florida, Northwood Mall on opening day (1969)
I could not find any sixpenny entrance and, fearing that the bazaar would be closed, I passed in quickly through a turnstile, handing a shilling to a weary-looking man. I found myself in a big hall girdled at half its height by a gallery. Nearly all the stalls were closed and the greater part of the hall was in darkness. I recognised a silence like that which pervades a church after a service. I walked into the centre of the bazaar timidly. A few people were gathered about the stalls which were still open. Before a curtain, over which the words Café Chantant were written in coloured lamps, two men were counting money on a salver. I listened to the fall of the coins.
Remembering with difficulty why I had come I went over to one of the stalls and examined porcelain vases and flowered tea-sets. At the door of the stall a young lady was talking and laughing with two young gentlemen. I remarked their English accents and listened vaguely to their conversation.
“O, I never said such a thing!”
“O, but you did!”
“O, but I didn’t!”
“Didn’t she say that?”
“Yes. I heard her.”
“O, there’s a … fib!”Observing me the young lady came over and asked me did I wish to buy anything. The tone of her voice was not encouraging; she seemed to have spoken to me out of a sense of duty. I looked humbly at the great jars that stood like eastern guards at either side of the dark entrance to the stall and murmured:
“No, thank you.”The young lady changed the position of one of the vases and went back to the two young men. They began to talk of the same subject. Once or twice the young lady glanced at me over her shoulder.
I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my interest in her wares seem the more real. Then I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the bazaar. I allowed the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket. I heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out. The upper part of the hall was now completely dark.
Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.
–from Dubliners, James Joyce
Couldn’t I just tell you the way I feel?
I can’t keep it bottled up inside
And could we pretend that it’s no big deal
And there’s really nothing left to hide?
Harris & Ewing, Young woman and man at automobile (1932 or 1933)
He went into the house, forgetting something he wanted to do there, and then remembering it was the piano. He sat down whistling and played by ear:
“Just picture you upon my knee
With tea for two and two for tea
And me for you and you for me–“Through the melody flowed a sudden realization that Nicole, hearing it, would guess quickly at a nostalgia for the past fortnight. He broke off with a casual chord and left the piano…
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, The Great Hall of the Library of Congress (ca. 1911)
Bell Telephone Magazine (1964)
No matter what you are
I will always be with you…
Marion Post Wolcott, Sugaring is a social event and is enjoyed by all the young people… (1940)
George Laur, Students on Their Way to Senior High School… (ca. 1975)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
–Delmore Schwartz, Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day (excerpt)
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight…
Flip Schulke, Vacationer From Ohio Relaxes near His Motorcycle… (ca. 1975)
“For me this is all mixed with memories that he doesn’t have. Cold mornings long ago when the marsh grass had turned brown and cattails were waving in the northwest wind…”
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I’ve been this way ten years to the day, ramble on…
Leonard McCombe, “I See My Love” (LIFE, 1951)
Tom Hubbard, August Brings the “D’aug Days”… (1973)
“…in Wildness is the preservation of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau, Walking
James Jowers, E. 8th st. (detail) (1967)
Katja Hasselkus, Couple Dancing (2009)
National Archives of Norway, Reiseradio
James Jowers, Woman In Department Store (1968)
James Jowers, Coney Is (1966)
Cosmic Oxter, “cafe couple” (2015)
Eliot Elisofon, Have You Heard? (LIFE magazine, 1942)
Cecil Stoughton, President Kennedy and daughter Caroline (1963)
“WALKER: Is there any meaning you can find in what has happened?
MOYNIHAN: I suppose the point that cuts deepest is the thought that there may not be…We all of us know down here that politics is a tough game. And I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually…”
—Excerpt from WTOP radio interview of Daniel Patrick Moynihan (December 5, 1963)
cf. David Falconer, Some Motorists… (edited) (ca. 1973)
cf. Russell Lee, Young couple dancing… (1940) and photographs by Ryan Hutton and Bill Williams via unsplash.com
National Archives UK, Swinging London (ca. 1969)
cf. Eadweard J. Muybridge, “Dancing (fancy)” (ca. 1884 – 1887)
James Jowers, Mulberry st. (1969)
Dick Swanson, One Of The Bicyclists Holds Her Ears Against The Roar Of The Jet Taking Off From National Airport (1973)
I went from Phoenix, Arizona
All the way to Tacoma,
Philadelphia, Atlanta, L.A.
Northern California where the girls are warm,
So I could be with my sweet baby, yeah…
cf. Francis Watts Lee, Unidentified Woman (ca. 1900)
cf. photograph (woman) by Gabriele Forcina via unsplash.com
James Jowers, Tompkins Sq. Park (1967)
George C. Laur, Students Arriving for School… (ca. 1975)
cf. James Jowers, Ave A + E. 7 st. (edited) (1967)
Gerald R. Massie, River Crossing (detail) (ca. 1955)
Édouard Vuillard, Amfréville-Driveway (detail) (1905)
cf. Alfred Stieglitz, Reflections, night, New York (ca. 1897)
The night was blustery and raw, with a chill wet wind blowing down the avenues, and when Rose and I met Franchise and her son and a friend at La Lorraine, a glittering brasserie not far from L’Etoile, rain was descending from the heavens in torrents. Someone in the group, sensing my state of mind, apologized for the evil night, but I recall thinking that even if this were one of those warmly scented and passionate evenings for which Paris is celebrated I would respond like the zombie I had become. The weather of depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.
—William Styron, Darkness Visible
cf. unknown photographer, Untitled (Two Men and Two Women) (detail) (ca. 1889)
cf. Marjory Collins, Macy’s department store at Herald Square (1942)
Suddenly I’m down in Herald Square
Looking in the crowd your face is everywhere
Been turning around
Do you want me now?
Do you want me now?
Lady Clementina Hawarden, Two Women on Porch (ca. 1862)
Fritz Henle, “…mail from home brings a smile to this young student nurse’s face” (1942)
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Passengers in the waiting room at Pennsylvania Station… (ca. 1911)
Tom Rogowski, “Springing Out All Over” (Cincinnati Magazine, 1978)
Andreas Feininger, View along US 40 in Mount Vernon Canyon, Colorado (1942)
John Vachon, Daughter of Farm Security Administration rehabilitation borrower listening to phonograph (1940)
Lewis Wickes Hine, 7 year old Alec applying for job on tobacco farms… (1917)
Jack Delano, In the train concourse at the Union Station (detail) (1943)
Dorothea Lange, Young family, penniless, hitchhiking… (1936)
Marjory Collins, Senior prom (1942)
Jack Delano, Blue Island, Illinois… (1943)
Carol M. Highsmith, Family Day on the grounds of the Alabama River Pulp Company (2010)
National Photo Company Collection, Radio at Children’s Hospital (1924)
Let there be music
Let it shine like the sun…
cf. Frank Eugene, Lydia Leslie Lydie – Candlestick (1900s)
cf. Arthur S. Siegel, Men and women workers coming out of the Chrysler Corporation (detail) (1942)
Belle Johnson (?), “He loves me. He loves me not.” (ca. 1910)
Marion S. Trikosko, Women shopping for clothes at Hecht Company department store, Fairfax, Virginia (1971)
Polaroid Photograph by Andrei Tarkovsky
Esther Bubley, Jitterbugs at an Elk’s Club dance (1943)
Remember when you were the talk of the town
And you didn’t care if I was around
But still you kept me in the back of your head
Just like the teddy bear that you took to bed
I was only something to fall back on…
cf. Edward Steichen, On the house-boat–“The Log Cabin” (1908)
A show of the summer softness—a contact of something unseen
—an amour of the light and air,
I am jealous and overwhelm’d with friendliness,
And will go gallivant with the light and air myself.
—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Walker Evans, Couple on Boat (1973–74)
“It seems as though we were all on a boat now together, a good boat still, that we have made but that we know now will never reach port. There will be all kinds of weather, good and bad, and especially because we know now that there will be no landfall we must keep the boat up very well and be very good to each other.”
—Ernest Hemingway, Letter to Gerald and Sara Murphy, March 19, 1935 on the death of their son.
Marjory Collins, “Bowery Hotel” (1942)
“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day…”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
Marjory Collins, The Swingshift Dance (1943)
Left: Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Gerard Willemetz and Dani (1926)
Right: Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Oléo (1908)
