The Odd Parts of Ends

I once saw a man so perfectly and completely formed by his nose that I couldn’t see anything other than his nose. This man had a whole entire head—two eyes, two ears, mouth with lips—but all I could see was his nose which, upon reflection, meant that there was something wrong with me and not with him, as I was the one staring at such a thing, his nose, and that I was the deformity, not him!

“We may not know what being human is, but we know what being inhuman is.” Theodor Adorno (on the Nazi’s).

“Lying as a way of life.” Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, (Schocken Books, 1951).

Brooks, when you’re making a story or a painting or anything else that aspires to art, adhere always to the original impulse and see what happens while you’re making it, not before or after but when you’re in the midst of making it. It’s true you may not like what you’ve made but it will be as well made as the original impulse could have made it.

I always turn around when I leave the studio in the evening, just after I’ve closed the back window and the front door, and say “goodbye, I’ll see you tomorrow morning, that I wanted everyone to know there’s no one here”, Brooks says.