An Interview in the Old Language

Page 256.

"I liked the idea of drawing out the rows of houses, extending them in time, understanding them as more important in their appearances than in the voices and sorrows they contained. It was an interview in the new language.

 Each silent and lovely home a slow memorial to some shrill inner moment unquieted by time"

[Translator] my old language of appropriation, or taking the concrete concepts of others, and using them in place of my own unrefined materials.

I've often intended to (and it wouldn't even be a difficult task, at all) set up a related but separate blog titled something like Taking Pictures from Books, where I would post phone photographs or scans of book pages or parts of them. Just to catalogue properly the numerous times i've literally taken photos of books, images and words. 

Spines and shadows.

 Orphans and Widows.

Of course we do this all of the time to some extent or other, absorbing and incorporating particles of places we've never been, sights never seen, maybe even feelings we've never felt. So too, in my case certainly, we pick out passages, sometimes unintentionally, that seem so relevant to a place or time in our own minds, that we cling to and seek a kind of solace in.

 I understand.

 We understood.

I took these, this week passed. The above while waiting for M in a bookshop, found in a handsome monograph titled Silent Theatre; The Art of Edward Hopper. A book I longed to have inhaled this time last year, immersed in the death rattle of my dissertation. I intend to add more of other people's words and images, and some of my own too. 

Especially on silence, 

which I miss hearing of late.