gray sunday morning

Emmett Stinson, Perth, says his holy trinity of books is Gaddis's The Recognitions x3.  I could see re-reading that book, more than digging into the Tunnel.  I "read" Recognitions at some stressful time and barely got what it was but enough to have been impressed and fascinated.  In all the good ways.  Stinson, on X, says "I like pretentious bookslop."  He follows 1.3k has 2.5 followers.  

apple photo claims Feb 4, 2016 we stood in front of the Taj Mahal to have our picture taken. 

steady rain now falling.  Headache has won, I've capitulated and taken two small advils.  10:46 am 

on X a few moments ago a post from Nicholas dated 2014 showed up, this famous passage from Merton:   

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak [God’s] name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship [and daughtership]. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely . . . . I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.  from Confessions of a Guilty Bystander

AI discovers  "Merton borrowed the exact phrase le point vierge from the renowned French Catholic scholar of Islam, Louis Massignon.   Massignon used the term to describe a concept found in Islamic mysticism (particularly from the Sufi mystic al-Hallaj)—the innermost, uncorrupted core of the human heart where the individual directly meets the divine truth.  

simmering onions, mushrooms and carrots to add

Sebald: 198: "Stifter rarely ever attempts . . . for the latent sense of panic beneath his quietist prose."

208  via Sontag  photography promotes forgetting; writing assumes a life in the future

216  "This is not so much a wish for death as a reversible simulation of dying."