Imagery and Contemplation
That’s a time-lapse photo of a highway (I believe U.S. Route 163 in Utah) leading to Monument Valley – with the center of the galaxy in the background. One of many astonishing astronomical photographs by Michael Abramy – but if that particular one doesn’t blow your mind I don’t know what will.
Nietzsche, from his essay “Schopenhauer as Educator”:
Where there have been powerful societies, governments, religions, public opinions, in short wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated; for philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force its way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart: and that annoys the tyrants.
What Nietzsche says of philosophy is even more true of prayer and contemplation. Lately I’ve been using the Church of England’s Daily Prayer app to begin each day with Morning Prayer and end it with Evening Prayer, and I scarcely have words to communicate how healing that has been for me – in an extremely difficult season of my life. Those prayerful bookends of my day have been an asylum, an “inward cave” in which the tyranny of presentism has no place.
That’s an image from a game … well, sort of a game, also a kind of contemplative exercise, called Townscraper. The artist Ursula Vernon has been playing it too, and decided to turn her play into a comic:
My friend Adam Roberts wrote a poem about two Babels.
I love it when my buddy Austin Kleon makes collages:
