reflections visual & literary * humanidades
The past can be truly seductive, despite all the evidence to the contrary and the fact that no one has ever returned from it. That is why I have always been suspicious of nostalgia: it always sprouts in the present, no matter when it was sown from the seeds of what people prefer to remember, and never from the dead seeds of what they prefer to forget.
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More than its reviews, it was the novel’s setting just after the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) — in which a remaining and lost Greek regiment wandered the deserts of Anatolia to find the sea — that sparked my curiosity to read Panos Karnezis’s, The Maze. Sebastian Faulk’s Birdsong and A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Story are […]
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I suspect that whomever can answer that question of whether gentrification is progress or problem shall answer all questions, because it reverts to a much more profound human challenge.
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According to the Law that goes by many names, including Ganesha, every doorway requires something to be left behind and something new to be accepted. This is the human dilemma, and it is one that is not getting any easier as there are ever more of us in this world, all unsatisfied, desiring progress and […]
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Properly called the America Windows, they are what everyone in Chicago has called the Chagall Windows for as long as I can remember, and I was born some years before they were installed in the Art Institute of Chicago in 1977. A tribute to a city and a nation from the great Russian-French-Jewish artist and […]
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The skyline might have changed. Millennium Park certainly had not existed. But there still so many things I remember about my hometown, even after more than twenty years abroad. Returning awakens the memories of how the summertime smells of cut grass and coming rain. Pizza. Those cement sidewalk stamps at the corners just before the […]
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Argentina, 1800s. A nubile captive, together with her infant child, are government prisoners, taken on long caravan as part of the supplies needed at the military outpost of a sinister colonial world deprived of women. It is just the beginning of the adventurous captivity of Ema, a “white” woman of unknown origins who is bartered […]
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The games continued, unfolding the birth of a new cuisine, in much the same way our ancestors had done on different continents.
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Since I do not think there is anything to be gained by believing in mere coincidence, this book cover staring at me from my shelf this morning of the 4th of July was all the more startling. The words of Swami’s intro to the classic Ātmabodha by Śri Śankara reminded me that democracy isn’t just […]
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The religious syncretism and the tradition of a culture, the simplicity in the details of the robes, the saturated contrasts of skin with the texture of vibrant fabrics translated into an authentic aesthetic wealth | Foi o sincretismo religioso e a tradição de uma cultura, a simplicidade nos detalhes das vestes, os contrastes saturados de pele com as texturas dos tecidos pujantes me traduziram uma autêntica riqueza estética.
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