Benvenuto Cellini, Perseus with the Head of Medusa, 1545-1554

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Red Right Hand

A Last Word by Ernest Dowson

LET us go hence: the night is now at hand;
The day is overworn, the birds all flown;
And we have reaped the crops the gods have sown;
Despair and death; deep darkness o'er the land,
Broods like an owl; we cannot understand
Laughter or tears, for we have only known
Surpassing vanity: vain things alone
Have driven our perverse and aimless band.
Let us go hence, somewhither strange and cold,
To Hollow Lands where just men and unjust
Find end of labour, where's rest for the old,
Freedom to all from love and fear and lust.
Twine our torn hands! O pray the earth enfold
Our life-sick hearts and turn them into dust.

When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be by John Keats

When I have fears that I may cease to be 
   Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, 
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery, 
   Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain; 
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, 
   Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, 
And think that I may never live to trace 
   Their shadows with the magic hand of chance; 
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, 
   That I shall never look upon thee more, 
Never have relish in the faery power 
   Of unreflecting love—then on the shore 
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think 
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Thomas Moran, The Angry Sea, 1911

Otto Dix, Der Krieg, 1929–1932

Jorge Méndez Blake, El Castillo (a.k.a. The Impact of a Book), 2007

John Martin, Satan Presiding at the Infernal Council, c.1823–27

James Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, 1875

John Paul Sartre and the Existential Choice

Epic comments section on this Youtube video

Mogwai, Take Me Somewhere Nice

Ghosts in the photograph
Never lie'd to me

I'd be all of that
I'd be all of that

A false memory
Would be everything
A denial my eliminent

What was that for? 
What was that for?

What would you do
If you saw spaceships
Over glasgow? 
Would you fear them?

Every aircraft
Every camera
Is a wish that
Wasn't granted

What was that for? 
What was that for?

Try to be bad
Try to be bad

Mogwai, Mogwai fear Satan

Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven

José Villegas Cordero, Siesta, 1874

Paul Delvaux, La ville Inquiète, 1941

Ivan Aivazovsky, Battle of Çesme at Night, 1848

José Benlliure y Gil, La barca de Caront, 1919

"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." ~ Antonio Gramsci

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The (Great) Tower of Babel, 1563

Carl Sagan, Cosmos