Tag Archives: black and white

I Move, Therefore I Am

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Judging from the spiderwebs clinging to it, the emergency stairway was hardly ever used. To each web clung a small black spider, patiently waiting for its small prey to come along. Not that the spiders had any awareness of being “patient”. A spider had no special skill other than building its web, and no lifestyle choice other than sitting still. It would stay in one place waiting for its prey until, in the natural course of things, it shriveled up and died. This was all genetically predetermined. The spider had no confusion, no despair, no regrets. No metaphysical doubt, no moral complications. Probably. Unlike me.
I move,therefore I am.”

― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

Trinity River Levee Dallas, Texas

Trinity River Levee
Dallas, Texas

Turning In the Widening Gyre

Posted on by Bill Chance

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
—–Yeats, The Second Coming

Stray Christmas Ball in the Trinity River, Dallas, Texas

Stray Christmas Ball in the Trinity River, Dallas, Texas

You Breathe In Nihilism

Posted on by Bill Chance

“If you live today, you breathe in nihilism … it’s the gas you breathe. If I hadn’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.”
― Flannery O’Connor

Tin Ceiling Frisco, Texas

Tin Ceiling
Frisco, Texas

I have always had a love for embossed tin ceilings and look out for them in old buildings across the heartland. This beautiful example is in the Lebanon Baptist Church in the Frisco Heritage Village. I took this shot while listening to a talented woman play the fiddle.

The only thing better than a tin ceiling is a tin roof.

That’s What This Storm’s All About

Posted on by Bill Chance

“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Trinity River Dallas, Texas

Trinity River
Dallas, Texas

People Stopped Being People

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we’ve all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

Frisco, Texas

Frisco, Texas

City Full Of Dreams

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Ant swarming City
City full of dreams
Where in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve”
― Charles Baudelaire

Dallas, Texas From the Trinity River Bottoms (click to enlarge)

Dallas, Texas
From the Trinity River Bottoms
(click to enlarge)

Heading A Handmade Nail

Posted on by Bill Chance

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
― Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being

Frisco Heritage Center Frisco, Texas

Frisco Heritage Center
Frisco, Texas

All Things Were Older Than Man

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Design District Dallas, Texas

Design District
Dallas, Texas

Teach Him What He Does Not Want To Learn

Posted on by Bill Chance

“A responsible Warrior is not someone who takes the weight of the world on his shoulders, but someone who has learned to deal with the challenges of the moment.”
― Paulo Coelho, Warrior of the Light

Design District Dallas, Texas

Design District
Dallas, Texas

“The Warrior knows that no man is an island.
He cannot fight alone; whatever his plan, he depends on other people. He needs to discuss his strategy, to ask for help, and, in moments of relaxation, to have someone with whom he can sit by the fire, someone he can regale with tales of battle.”

“Then the Warrior realizes that these repeated experiences have but one aim: to teach him what he does not want to learn.”
― Paulo Coelho, Warrior of the Light

The Sword Of Damocles Is Hanging Over My Head

Posted on by Bill Chance

The sword of Damocles is hanging over my head
And I’ve got the feeling someone’s gonna be cutting the thread
Oh, woe is me, my life is a misery
Oh, can’t you see that I’m at the start of a pretty big downer?
—-The Rocky Horror Show

Damocles