Who serves best doesn’t always understand

 Love

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills—
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn’t always understand.

        Czeslaw Milosz

 

Betsabé

 

If equal affection cannot be

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

W.H. Auden, 1960 

Solidarity with Iranian Women Who Reject Hijab

© Femen.org

Speed of life (Peter Hujar)

The Morgan Library & Museum in NYC currently hosts a not-to-be-missed exhibition about Peter Hujar:

Helsinki, April 2017

Oman, March 2017

George Michael, 1963-2016

A voice like Summer rain gone silent.

A woman with a cat waited for transportation to a nearby village. She had fled fighting in Mosul, where Iraqi forces battled the Islamic State. Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Sanahin, Armenia, October 2016

How Trump's brain works

Copyright Roz Chast, The New Yorker, Oct 2016

Tintin

Ivo Dimchev yesterday doing what he does best

1899

The Iranian 'ID card challenge' asks Iranians who they really are (BBC)

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-34884408

Paris and Beirut