No iron can pierce the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time.
Isaac BabelRead
The orange sky is rolling across the sky like a severed head, gentle light glimmers in the ravines among the clouds, the banners of the sunset are fluttering above our heads. The stench of yesterday’s blood and slaughtered horses drips into the evening chill.
Interpretation
This quote paints a vivid and contrasting picture of beauty and horror in the natural world.
Isaac Babel's quote juxtaposes the serene imagery of a sunset with the grim realities of violence and loss. The use of striking visuals, likening the sunset to a severed head, evokes a sense of both awe and repulsion, highlighting the complexities of life where beauty and brutality coexist, and prompting reflection on the scars left by past conflicts.
In practice
In a poetry reading focused on the duality of life and death.
I love performing outside because it's as if the heavens are open and the elements become part of the stage show as well - you know, the wind and the rain and the thunder. It's almost as if there's a sense of invocation in performance.
I have always tried with my shows - win, lose, or draw - to take the boundaries of music as far as I can.
Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.
The complete novelist would come into the world with a catalog of qualities like this. He would own the concentration of a Trappist monk, the organizational ability of a Prussian field marshal, the insight into human relations of a Viennese psychologist, the discipline of a man who prints the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin, the exquisite sense of timing of an Olympic gymnast, and by the way, a natural instinct and flair for exceptional use of language.
He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion... no, make that: he - he romanticized it all out of proportion. Yes. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.
Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
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