I go to meet my image and my image comes to meet me: it caresses and embraces me as if I were returning from captivity. from the Mandaean Liturgies for the Dead

His own religious conscience in the form of a fair maiden.
from the Avesta

God is identical with Space.
Jonathan Edwards, Notes

Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.
Augustine, The Confessions

My dear fellow--if the public believes that a picture is by Raphael, and will pay the price of a Raphael--then it is a Raphael.
William Gaddis, The Recognitions

Chianti is Sangiovese with a straw additive.
loosely translated from the Etruscan

Let them slay one god and let the gods be purified in the judgement.
The Babylonian Poem of Creation


* * *

We have come to live at Miss Hester's, Anibal and me. We do not feel entirely at home here. It does not help that the sickening sweet odor of banana paste rises through the floor boards, filling our nostrils with its putrid uncertainty. Ours is a commonplace loft with walls that annoy us and hem us in at every turn. Early in the morning, when the sun rays penetrate horizontally through the tall windows facing east, our bodies become starkly visible and the loft presents itself as a contain- er measurable with those wooden rulers Miss Hester keeps for use on her canvases. It is, then, as if we were in Miss Hester's like objects in a box.