Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Portrait of Oscar Wilde, 1900

Image of the Orion Nebula taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope between 2004 and 2005.

Max Beckmann, The Night, 1919

"What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears." ~ Seneca

The School of Life: The Stoics

Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Seneca, 1773

Supermoon Lunar Eclipse

Echo and the Bunnymen, The Killing Moon

Died this day

Edgar Degas, Dancers Practising at the Barre, 1877

Died this day

Edgar Degas, After Bathing, Woman Drying Herself, 1905

Born this day

The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

      A penny for the Old Guy

      I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

      II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

      III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

      IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

      V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
            For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
            Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
            For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The School of Life: John Rawls

Born this day

Shostakovich, String Quartet No.8, Op. 110, Mv.2

Red House Painters, All Mixed Up (Cars cover)

Asger Jorn, Stalingrad (aka The Mad Laughter), 1956

Asger Jorn, Letter to my Son, 1957

"In 1840, Babbage was invited to give a seminar at the University of Turin about his Analytical Engine. Luigi Menabrea, a young Italian engineer, and the future Prime Minister of Italy, wrote up Babbage's lecture in French, and this transcript was subsequently published in the Bibliothèque universelle de Genève in October 1842. Babbage's friend Charles Wheatstone commissioned Lovelace to translate Menabrea's paper into English. She then augmented the paper with notes, which were added to the translation. Lovelace spent the better part of a year doing this, assisted with input from Babbage. These notes, which are more extensive than Menabrea's paper, were then published in Taylor's Scientific Memoirs under the initialism AAL. In 1953, more than a century after her death, Lovelace's notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished. The engine has now been recognised as an early model for a computer and her notes as a description of a computer and software. Lovelace's notes were labelled alphabetically from A to G. In note G, she describes an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. It is considered the first algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, and Ada has often been cited as the first computer programmer for this reason. The engine was never completed, however, so her code was never tested." Wikipedia

Leftfield, Melt

Robert Oscar Lenkiewicz, Death and the Maiden

Niccolò dell'Arca, The Two Marys, ~1460s

Pablo Picasso, Brooding Woman (recto) , Three Children (verso) , 1904

Gaetano Cellini, Humanity Against Evil, 1908