Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have noInner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
—-John Berryman, The Dream Songs
(click to enlarge)
Magnolia Building
Dallas, Texas
“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.”
― Henry Moore
Henry Moore, Two-Piece Reclining Figure No. 2
Richard Serra, Vortex
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
What interests me is the opportunity for all of us to become something different from what we are, by constructing spaces that contribute something to the experience of who we are.
—-Richard Serra
But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country For Old Men
Downtown Dallas, Texas
“She didn’t need to understand the meaning of life; it was enough to find someone who did, and then fall asleep in his arms and sleep as a child sleeps, knowing that someone stronger than you is protecting you from all evil and all danger”
― Paulo Coelho, Brida
Adolphus Hotel
Dallas, Texas
“Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.”
― James Wood, How Fiction Works
Detail
Pioneer Plaza
Dallas, Texas
Detail
Pioneer Plaza
Dallas, Texas
Detail
Pioneer Plaza
Dallas, Texas
“I’d been chasing females all my life, not paying no mind to the fact that whatever’s got tail at one end has teeth at the other, and now I was getting chomped.”
― Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280
Pioneer Plaza
Dallas, Texas
If you don’t die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.
—-Anne Lamott
Pioneer Plaza
Dallas, Texas
So many people visit and take photos of the bronze cattle drive in Pioneer Plaza. It’s a challenge to find something ten thousand tourists haven’t shot on their phones before.
“By early evening all the sky to the north had darkened and the spare terrain they trod had turned a neuter gray as far as the eye could see. They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
The Continental Building
Dallas, Texas
Click Here for a larger version on Flickr.
This is a well-known mosaic by Millard Sheets on the front of The Continental Building in downtown Dallas. There was some worry that the artwork would be destroyed during renovation – but the owners have committed to preserving it.
“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
Adolphus Hotel
Dallas, Texas
“If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse… but surely you will see the wildness!”
― Pablo Picasso
Downtown Dallas, Texas
Bill Chance 