In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera wrote: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” This perspective—one that bears the marks of life under a totalitarian regime in which repression often took the form of enforced forgetting—assumes that remembering is always a virtue and that not doing so is necessarily a failing. But despite dominating much of the debate on cultural memory, this perspective elides the many differences between all the various acts that we cluster under the term “forgetting.” Are all acts of forgetting similar enough that we can think of them, always and necessarily, as a failure? Can forgetting in fact even be a virtue? And how do we understand the relationship between what needs to be forgotten in order for other things to be remembered?
Source: labellefilleart
The Avett Brothers - Head Full Of Doubt/Road Full Of Promise. Painted by Jason Mitcham.
You like? Check out 2600 Paintings In 1 to see how it was made.
Source: imageoscillite
Blue Chaos by film photographer Jacob Felländer
(indirectly via I Still Shoot Film)
Source: jacobfellander.com
SoHo by film photographer Jacob Felländer
(indirectly via I Still Shoot Film)
Source: jacobfellander.com
SoHo Empire by film photographer Jacob Felländer
(indirectly via I Still Shoot Film)
Source: jacobfellander.com
“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close in him to time.
In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory: the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
Slowness - Milan Kundera via Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects on slowness.
Source: twbta.com
My father did not want me to become an architect.
I believe he felt that I lacked a certain edge, or perhaps a sense of self-preservation, that One Needs To Get Ahead in this world. He endlessly related to me the story of a casual acquaintance of his, whom in his mid-fifties was angry and disillusioned as an architect, not much more than a draughtsman, it seems, making reality of other people’s dreams but not his own.
Not for my father. He was in control of his destiny. When I was a child he was the archetypal traveling salesman, selling encyclopedias at exhibitions and carnivals across the US and Canada. Visiting him at work was a child’s dream, being allowed access to the inner workings of the Show: Go! Stand with the Man Behind the Curtain! As a purveyor of typeset and bound knowledge, he seemed to me (then a child of single-digits) like an island of respectability around which raged a sea of con-artists, hawking their dubious gadgets to susceptible crowds. I later realized that he too was as much a player, wielding his respectability like a weapon, disarming the passersby with a winning smile, advancing mercilessly for the close. Always making a play for the sale.
After many years he chose to leave that job and life behind; his traveling had become too hard for him and our family. His skills transported well into his next career in real estate, where over the following 20 years he built a solid reputation that filled-out his image of respectability.
When his cancer struck, it was immediate and brutal. After the initial misdiagnosis was corrected, he lasted four months. He died in his home office, his den, where my family had set up a makeshift sick room. I was nearby in the dining room when it happened, my mother was by his side. It was two days after Christmas, several years ago now.
It strikes me that the plans we make and the passion with which we pursue them are ephemeral. As Joan Didion succinctly phrased it, life changes in the instant.
Why architecture then? Why build dreams, be they our dreams or another’s?
Because the city outlives us. At least for a while.
Were he still with us, my father would have turned 80 today. Happy Birthday Dad - though we had our differences, I still miss you terribly.
Source: deconcrete.org
The Memory Bank,
West, Wallace
Airmont Books
1962
cover by Ralph Brillhart
(via empirevalley)
Source: flic.kr
