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Claire’s Knee (1970)

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Sister Wendy Beckett

25 February 1930 – 26 December 2018

Educator Sister Wendy Beckett received her education at Oxford University, where she read English Literature. Professor J.R.R. Tolkien was selected as presiding officer for her final examining panel. She was given Congratulatory First-Class Honours, which at Oxford is “a highly unusual honour in which the examining professors ask no questions about the candidate’s written work but simply stand and applaud.” This applause was led by Professor Tolkien. Tolkien soon after asked Sister Wendy to stay on at Oxford to teach, but she declined. 

She instead pursued a long and celebrated career within the Roman Catholic holy order of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur (dedicated to bringing education to the poor). She is best known for her books and television presentations on art history and the saints. Within her order she took vows as a Religious Sister, a Hermit, and as a Consecrated Virgin.

Sister Wendy passed away this week at the age of 88.

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Priorities.

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Talked to Kim Cattrall at the Sophie Calle thing.

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I’d planned to die at thirty, and then I’d push it on ten years, forty, and then fifty. You always push it on. And then you go on and on and on. It’s difficult. Too much trouble. I’ve thought about death a great deal. One day in the snow I felt so tired. I thought, “Damn it, I’ll sit down. I can’t go on. I’m tired of living here in the snow and ice.” So I sat down on the ground. But it was so cold I got up. Oh yes, I used to try to imagine death, but I always come up against a wall.

Jean Rhys (via booradleyy)

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For to wish to forget how much you loved someone - and then, to actually forget - can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting “the fundamental impermanence of all things”. This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness).

Maggie Nelson, Bluets

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Shomei Tomatsu, Nagasaki.

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The Thin Red Line (1998)

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Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.

John Berger (via rabbitinthemoon)

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Ingmar Bergman on his artistic influences

Swedish Television, 1966

Criterion Collection

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I like you; your eyes are full of language.

Anne Sexton, Letter to Anne Clarke: July 3, 1964 (via quotethat)

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1. Egon Schiele drawing

2. Embrace, by Billy Collins

You know the parlor trick. wrap your arms around your own body and from the back it looks like someone is embracing you her hands grasping your shirt her fingernails teasing your neck from the front it is another story you never looked so alone your crossed elbows and screwy grin you could be waiting for a tailor to fit you with a straight jacket one that would hold you really tight. 

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It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.”

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (via nemophilies)

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Maestro Fellini on the set of 8 ½, photo by Tazio Secchiaroli

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Romy Schneider and Alain Delon at home in France, 1959.

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The great film critic Pauline Kael

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“We often have to explain to young people why study is useful. It’s pointless telling them that it’s for the sake of knowledge, if they don’t care about knowledge. Nor is there any point in telling them that an educated person gets through life better than an ignoramus, because they can always point to some genius who, from their standpoint, leads a wretched life. And so the only answer is that the exercise of knowledge creates relationships, continuity, and emotional attachments. It introduces us to parents other than our biological ones. It allows us to live longer, because we don’t just remember our own life but also those of others. It creates an unbroken thread that runs from our adolescence (and sometimes from infancy) to the present day. And all this is very beautiful.”

Umberto Eco (1932 - 2016, RIP)