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There was a shop on Lexingon that advertised passport pictures. I like to go sometimes. I keep them in a little album. Mostly they're of me, except for one, which ia of Isaac, aged five, and another of my cousin, the locksmith. He was an amateur photographer and one day he showed me how to make a pinhole camera. This was the spring of 1947. I stood in the back of his tiny shop watching him fix the photographic paper inside the box. He told me to sit, and shone a lamp on my face. Then he removed the cover over the pinhole. I sat so still I was hardly breathing. When it was finished we went into the darkroom and dropped it in the developing pan. We waited. Nothing. Where I should have been there was only scratchy grayness. My cousin insisted we do it again, so we did it again, and again, nothing. Three times he tried to take a picture of me with the pinhole camera, and three times I failed to appear. My cousin couldn't understand it. He cursed the man who sold him the paper, thinking he'd been given a bad batch. But I knew he hadn't. I knew that the way others had lost a leg or an arm, I'd lost whatever the thing is that makes people indelible. I told my cousin to sit in the chair. He was reluctant, but finally he agreed. I took a photograph of him, and as we watched the paper in the developing pan his face appeared. He laughed. And I laughed, too. It was I who'd taken the picture, and if it was proof of his existence, it was also proof of my own. He let me keep it. Whenever I took it out of my wallet and looked at him, I knew I was really looking at me. ↗
Just above the cavern's mouth was a narrow ledge of rock running horizontally, and of a few inches in width. On this natural shelf, reflected in the water, I saw, hanging downwards, a decayed fragment of goat-skin, rotten with age, but which might have been bound round something, long years before. Upon this, as if escaped from its folds, rested a Head. It was a human head, severed at the neck, but fresh and unfaded as if but newly dead. It bore the features of a woman - of a woman of more perfect loveliness than was ever told of in tale, or sculptured in marble, or painted on canvas. Every feature, every line was of the truest beauty, cast in the noblest mould - the face of a goddess. But upon that perfect countenance was the mark of eternal pain, of deathless agony and suffering past words. The forehead was lined and knit, the death-white lips were tightly pressed in speechless torment; in the wide eyes seemed yet to lurk the flame of an unquenchable fire; while around the fair brows, in place of hair, curled and coiled the stark bodies of venomous serpents, stiff in death, but their loathsome forms still erect, their evil heads yet thrust forward as if to strike. My heart ceased beating, and the chill of death crept over my limbs, as with eyes starting from their sockets I stared at that awful head, reflected in the pool. For hours it seemed to me I gazed fascinated, as the bird by the eye of the snake that has charmed it. I was as incapable of thought as movement, till suddenly forgotten school-room learning began to cross my brain, and I knew that I looked at the reflection of Medusa, the Gorgon, fairest and foulest of living things, the unclean creature, half woman, half eagle, slain by the hero Perseus, and one glimpse of whose tortured face turned the luckless beholder into stone with the horror of it. ("The Gorgon's Head") ↗
Asshole.” “Just for that, I expect you to wrap that dirty mouth of yours around my cock tonight.” He narrowed his eyes on me. I couldn’t believe he’d just said that to me in a fancy restaurant where anyone might overhear. “Are you kidding?” “Babe,” he gave me a look that suggested I was missing the obvious, “I never kid about blowjobs.” Our waiter had descended on us just in time to hear those romantic words and his rosy cheeks betrayed his embarrassment. “Ready to order?” he croaked out.“Yes,” Braden answered, obviously uncaring he’d been overhead. “I’ll have the steak, medium-rare.” He smiled softly at me. “What are you having?” He took a swig of water. He thought he was so cool and funny. “Apparently sausage.” Braden choked on the water, coughing into his fists, his eyes bright with mirth as he put his glass back on the table. “Are you okay, sir?” The waiter asked anxiously. “I’m fine, I’m fine. ↗
The human body is the best picture of the human soul. ↗
#best #best picture #body #human #human body
There are some things you don’t have to know how it works – only that it works. While some people are studying the roots, others are picking the fruit. It just depends on which end of this you want to get in on." -- Jim Rohn ↗
Oh well,' said Jack: and then, 'Did you ever meet Bach?' 'Which Bach?' 'London Bach.' 'Not I.' 'I did. He wrote some pieces for my uncle Fisher, and his young man copied them out fair. But they were lost years and years ago, so last time I was in town I went to see whether I could find the originals: the young man has set up on his own, having inherited his master's music-library. We searched through the papers — such a disorder you would hardly credit, and I had always supposed publishers were as neat as bees — we searched for hours, and no uncle's pieces did we find. But the whole point is this: Bach had a father.' 'Heavens, Jack, what things you tell me. Yet upon recollection I seem to have known other men in much the same case.' 'And this father, this old Bach, you understand me, had written piles and piles of musical scores in the pantry.' 'A whimsical place to compose in, perhaps; but then birds sing in trees, do they not? Why not antediluvian Germans in a pantry?' 'I mean the piles were kept in the pantry. Mice and blackbeetles and cook-maids had played Old Harry with some cantatas and a vast great passion according to St Mark, in High Dutch; but lower down all was well, and I brought away several pieces, 'cello for you, fiddle for me, and some for both together. It is strange stuff, fugues and suites of the last age, crabbed and knotted sometimes and not at all in the modern taste, but I do assure you, Stephen, there is meat in it. I have tried this partita in C a good many times, and the argument goes so deep, so close and deep, that I scarcely follow it yet, let alone make it sing. How I should love to hear it played really well — to hear Viotti dashing away. ↗
