“A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.”
― The Grapes of Wrath
Caribbean Sunset
“It is not for me to judge another man’s life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.”
― Siddhartha
Buddhist Center of Dallas
When the typewriters happen to pause (8:20 and other mythical hours), and there are no flights of American bombers in the sky, and the motor traffic’s not too heavy in Oxford Street, you can hear winter birds cheeping outside, busy at the feeders the girls have put up.
—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
B-25 “Devil Dog,” Commemorative Air Force, Dallas, Texas
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.”
― Gravity’s Rainbow
Fabrication Yard, Dallas, Texas
P-47S fly over in squadron box formations, four checkmarks apiece RedWhiteBlueYellow on the un-amended form of the whitish sky, squadron after squadron: it is either some military review, or another war. A plasterer is busy around the corner, smoothing over a bomb-scarred wall, plaster heaped on his hawk luscious as cream cheese, using an unfamiliar trowel inherited from a dead friend, still, these first days, digging holes like an apprentice, the shiny knife-edge not yet broken to his hand, the curl of it a bit more than his own strength could have ever brought it to … Henry was a larger bloke…. The fly, who was not dead, unfolds its wings and zooms off to fool somebody else.
—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Commemorative Air Force, Dallas, Texas
The barrage-balloon cables lay rusting across the sodden meadows, going to flakes, to ions and earth – tendons that sang in the violent nights, among the sirens wailing in thirds smooth as distant wind, among the drumbeats of bombs, now lying slack, old, in hard twists of metal ash. Forget-me-nots boil everywhere underfoot, and ants crowd, bustling with a sense of kingdom. Commas, brimstones, painted ladies coast on the thermoclines along the cliffs. Jessica has cut fringes since Roger saw her last, and is going through the usual anxiety – “It looks utterly horrible, you don’t have to say it….”
“It’s utterly swoony,” sez Roger, “I love it.”
“You’re making fun.”
“Jess, why are we talking about haircuts for God’s sake?”
—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Fabrication Yard, Dallas, Texas
“I shivered in those
solitudes
when I heard
the voice
of
the salt
in the desert.”
― Pablo Neruda
Dry Fountain, Dallas Arboretum
“Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Decatur, Texas
“I thought climbing the Devil’s Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
Arts District, Dallas, Texas – PATHS by Steinunn Thórarinsdóttir at HALL Arts
We’ll go walkin’ to Tietze Park
—- The O’s, We’ll Go Walking
The O’s, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas
Bill Chance 