“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.”

“We truly possess only that which we have lost”.

“(…) in the society of time profitability (…). The natural therapy of gardening comes from suspended time, from time that cannot be controlled and, in fact, in a certain way, is what keeps us standing. When a seed is placed in the soil, it announces a becoming, while the past is erased; nostalgia has no place in the garden. The garden is a privileged place of the future, a mental territory of hope.”

“What has happened (geschehen) has always only half happened (halb geschehen), and the force that made it happen, which expressed itself in it inadequately, continues to operate within us and casts its glow also on partial, future attempts that still lie within us (…). What could never pass must be shattered; what never became itself must be dissolved, and that which never fully happened (das nie ganz Geschehene) must be fulfilled in new moments. Certainly, the past seems solidified, asleep, as it tends to cover itself with increasing darkness as it recedes further from us. But all of this can awaken: it has remained fluid and changeable, and continues to flow underground, with nothing immutable about it (…). Despite its apparent crystallization in the past, in its transience it still harbours something secret, an element of the future (ein Element des Zukünftigen), just as the crystallization of the future in the pacified present of hindsight or judgment carries above itself alternatives, unknown gods that await us. To pursue this pulsing element, to untie in regret this repressed future that could not realise itself in the thick matter of what has become (…)

“But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”

•“Loyalties. They’re invisible ties that bind us to others – to the dead as well as the living. They’re promises we’ve murmured but whose echo we don’t hear, silent fidelities. They’re contracts we make, mostly with ourselves, passwords acknowledged though unheard, debts we harbour in the folds of our memories. They’re the rules of childhood dormant within our bodies, the values in whose name we stand up straight, the foundations that enable us to resist, the illegible principles that eat away at us and confine us. Our wings and our fetters.
They’re the springboards from which our strength takes flight and the trenches in which we bury our dreams.

Art is as realistic as activity, symbolic as facts

Voyager, c’est bien utile, ça fait travailler l’imagination. Tout le reste n’est que déceptions et fatigues. Notre voyage à nous est entièrement imaginaire. Voilà sa force…

“Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.“