Every year, right before Labor Day, 50,000 people travel to Black Rock City, Nevada to take part in Burning Man — an experimental community dedicated to radical self reliance, radical self-expression and art. The 2016 edition is underway. And you can feel free to drop in any time. Above, watch a live stream of life on the dusty Playa. Hopefully things should get pretty interesting on Saturday night when they set fire to “the Man.”
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“Did they have color in the past?” This question, one often hears, ranks among the darndest things said by kids, or at least kids who have learned a little about history, but not the history of photography. But even the kids who get seriously swept up in stories and images of the past might hold on to the misconception, given how thoroughly time has monochromatized the artifacts of previous civilizations. As much as such precocious youngsters have always learned from trips to the museum to see, for instance, ancient Greek statues, they haven’t come away with an accurate impression of how they really looked in their day.
Recent research has begun to change that. “To us, classical antiquity means white marble,” writes Smithsonian magazine’s Matthew Gurewitsch. “Not so to the Greeks, who thought of their gods in living color and portrayed them that way too. The temples that housed them were in color, also, like mighty stage sets. Time and weather have stripped most of the hues away. And for centuries people who should have known better pretended that color scarcely mattered.” But today, the right mix of inspection with ultraviolet light and infrared and x‑ray spectroscopy has made it possible to figure out the very colors with which these apparently colorless statues once called out to the eye.
Enter German archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann, who, “armed with high-intensity lamps, ultraviolet light, cameras, plaster casts and jars of costly powdered minerals,” has “spent the past quarter century trying to revive the peacock glory that was Greece” by “creating full-scale plaster or marble copies hand-painted in the same mineral and organic pigments used by the ancients: green from malachite, blue from azurite, yellow and ocher from arsenic compounds, red from cinnabar, black from burned bone and vine.” You can see the results in the Getty Museum video at the top of the post.
In the years since the discovery of ancient Greek statues’ original colors, the reactions of us moderns have, shall we say, varied. We’ve grown accustomed to, and grown to admire, the austerity of white marble, which we’ve come to associate with an idea of the purity of antiquity. (The Getty itself used a similarly evocative stone, extensively and at staggering expense, in the construction of their Richard Meier-designed complex overlooking Los Angeles.) And so the bold colors revealed by Brinkmann and his collaborators may, on first or even second glance, strike us as gaudy, kitschy, tacky. However you re-evaluate its aesthetics, though, you have to feel a certain exhilaration at the fact that the ancient world has continued to hold surprises for us.
The image above is an archer from the western pediment of the Temple of Aphaia on Aigina, via Wikimedia Commons.
Way back when, we featured an animation that documented the first acid trip of novelist Ken Kesey. In Kesey’s case, it all happened in a careful, calculated way in 1959, under the care and control of the U.S. government. Six years later and 5,000+ miles away, John Lennon’s maiden voyage went down in a very different way. A dentist–yes, a dentist of all people–slipped LSD into John and George’s coffee, unbeknownst to them. Next thing they knew buildings were bursting into fire, and rooms morphing into submarines. So began the Beatles’ experimentation with psychedelics and new musical sounds, which, together, shaped their 1965 masterpiece, Revolver(stream it free on Spotify).
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“We can say of Shakespeare,” wrote T.S. Eliot—in what may sound like the most backhanded of compliments from one writer to another—“that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.” Eliot, it’s true, was not overawed by the Shakespearean canon; he pronouncedHamlet “most certainly an artistic failure,” though he did love Coriolanus. Whatever we make of his ambivalent, contrarian opinions of the most famous author in the English language, we can credit Eliot for keen observation: Shakespeare’s universe, which can seem so sprawlingly vast, is actually surprisingly spare given the kinds of things it mostly contains.
This is due in large part to the visual limitations of the stage, but perhaps it also points toward an author who made great works of art from humble materials. Look, for example, at a search cloud of the Bard’s plays.
You’ll find one the front page of the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive, the PhD project of Michael Goodman, doctoral candidate in Digital Humanities at Cardiff University. The cloud on the left features a galaxy composed mainly of elemental and archetypal beings: “Animals,” “Castles and Palaces,” “Crowns,” “Flora and Fauna,” “Swords,” “Spears,” “Trees,” “Water,” “Woods,” “Death.” One thinks of the Zodiac or Tarot.
This particular search cloud, however, does not represent the most prominent terms in the text, but rather the most prominent images in four collections of illustrated Shakespeare plays from the Victorian period. Goodman’s site hosts over 3000 of these illustrations, taken from four major UK editions of Shakespeare’s Complete Works published in the mid-19th century. The first, published by editor Charles Knight, appeared in several volumes between 1838 and 1841, illustrated with conservative engravings by various artists. Knight’s edition introduced the trend of spelling Shakespeare’s name as “Shakspere,” as you can see in the title page to the “Comedies, Volume I,” at the top of the post. Further down, see two representative illustrations from the plays, the first of Hamlet’s Ophelia and second Coriolanus’ Roman Forum, above.
Part of a wave of “early Victorian populism” in Shakespeare publishing, Knight’s edition is joined by one from Kenny Meadows, who contributed some very different illustrations to an 1854 edition. Just above, see a Goya-like illustration from The Tempest. Later came an edition illustrated by H.C. Selous in 1864, which returned to the formal, faithful realism of the Knight edition (see a rendering of Henry V, below), and includes photograuvure plates of famed actors of the time in costume and an appendix of “Special Wood Engraved Illustrations by Various Artists.”
The final edition whose illustrations Goodman has digitized and catalogued on his site features engravings by artist John Gilbert. Also published in 1864, the Gilbert may be the most expressive of the four, retaining realist proportions and mise-en-scène, yet also rendering the characters with a psychological realism that is at times unsettling—as in his fierce portrait of Lear, below. Gilbert’s illustration of The Taming of the Shrew’s Katherina and Petruchio, further down, shows his skill for creating believable individuals, rather than broad archetypes. The same skill for which the playwright has so often been given credit.
But Shakespeare worked both with rich, individual character studies and broader, archetypal, material: psychological realism and mythological classicism. What I think these illustrated editions show us is that Shakespeare, whoever he (or she) may have been, did indeed have a keen sense of what Eliot called the “objective correlative,” able to communicate complex emotions through “a skillful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions” that have impressed us as much on the canvas, stage, and screen as they do on the page. The emotional expressiveness of Shakespeare’s plays comes to us not only through eloquent verse speeches, but through images of both the starkly elemental and the uniquely personal.
Spend some time with the illustrated editions on Goodman’s site, and you will develop an appreciation for how the plays communicate differently to the different artists. In addition to the search clouds, the site has a header at the top for each of the four editions. Click on the name and you will see front and back matter and title pages. In the pull-down menus, you can access each individual play’s digitized illustrations by type—“Histories,” “Comedies,” and “Tragedies.” All of the content on the site, Goodman writes, “is free through a CC license: users can share on social media, remix, research, create and just do whatever they want really!”
It’s hard to imagine a time when Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” didn’t belong to all of us. One day it didn’t exist. And then one day it did, and for so many of us who heard that churning opening chord, that was it. Maybe it took one listen, or five, but it was clear this song was going to mean something. And as the autumn of 1991 wore on, it would take on the weight of many things—expectations of a new generation, a new decade, the end of hair metal, the beginning of grunge, the return of rock, or just as correctly, rock’s last gasp.
The song was released to radio stations in August, issued as a single on September 10, 1991, and then officially released on September 24, 1991. But “Smells Like Teen Spirit” really broke a month later, when MTV premiered it on 120 Minutes. Then the band watched as it became a daytime MTV hit, then a hit on every rock radio playlist, from “modern rock” to “college rock” and all the marketing divisions in between.
The above video shows the band playing the song before any of this happened, just two days after the release of Nevermind. As Jason Kottke said on his site when he posted this, “There’s a freight train bearing down on those boys and they don’t even know it.”
The performance comes from a gig at The Moon in New Haven, Connecticut (see it all above), the band playing on a small stage, with such a low ceiling that bassist Krist Novoselic looks like he’s going to bang his head on the ceiling. The audience is one huge mosh pit, all male, it seems, and you can smell the sweat and stale beer through the screen. Did the crowd know they were seeing a band on the cusp? Is it too much to read into that yelp from the audience, during the second quiet passage, that they’re witnessing a finely constructed hit, the kind of loud-soft dynamic that would be copied and echoed through the nineties.
By April of the following year the song would be so popular Weird Al Yankovic would have made his parody version (one of his best). And soon Kurt Cobain would be swallowed by fame, seeing only a few ways out of his predicament. But here they are for a brief moment in time, perhaps thinking that there would be more clubs like The Moon, just a bit bigger, maybe just a bit smaller, on the horizon.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
I first encountered the world of Maurits Cornelis Escher where many others do: in school. A poster of his 22-foot-long Metamorphosis III hung along the walls of my fourth-grade classroom, where I spent many an idle minute or ten staring at its intricate geometry through which squares became birds, birds became lizards, lizards became fish, and it all somehow arrived at the cliff-like edge of a three-dimensional chessboard. It came as the last of a trilogy of woodcuts Escher made between 1937 and 1968, and a journey through its 1940 predecessor Metamorphosis II ends the 1971 documentary above, M.C. Escher: Adventures in Perception.
Escher himself seemingly had no happy classroom memories. “I hated school,” the narrator quotes him as saying. “The only class I liked at all was art. That doesn’t mean I was any good at it.” Though his work has no doubt inspired many youngsters to take up drawing, woodcutting, and printmaking themselves, it’s surely driven even more of them into mathematics.
Obsessed with perspective, geometry, and pattern (Escher described tessellation as “a real mania to which I have become addicted”), his images have, by the count of mathematician and Escher scholar Doris Schattschneider, led so far to eleven separate strands of mathematical and scientific research.
The twenty-minute Adventures in Perception, originally commissioned by the Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs, offers in its first half a meditation on the mesmerizing, often impossible world Escher had created with his art to date. Its second half captures Escher in the last years of his life, still at work in his Laren, North Holland studio. It even shows him printing one of the three titular serpents, threaded through a set of elaborately interlocking circles, of his very last print Snakes. He never actually finished Snakes, whose patterns would have continued on to the effect of infinity, and even says here of his officially complete works that none succeed, “because it’s the dream I tried for that can’t be realized.” But those unrealized dreams have kept the rest of us dreaming, and thinking, ever since.
Briefly noted: If you’re interested in entrepreneurship and marketing, you’ve likely encountered Seth Godin and his ever popular blog. Or perhaps you’ve read some of his bestselling books? But maybe you’ve never come across this: the “Startup School” where Godin guides 30 entrepreneurs through “how to build and run their dream business.” On his blog, Godin wrote back in 2012:
I love startups. Not only do they bring the promise of rapid growth and real change, but everything is up for grabs. Organizations that start with a clean sheet of paper have the difficult task of paying the bills, but they also have the luxury of ignoring yesterday in order to focus exclusively on tomorrow.
Through the years, I’ve started a bunch of companies and enjoyed brainstorming with the people who have launched companies big and small, from AOL when they only had a dozen employees to some of the very cool organizations that come through the doors of NY Techstars.
Next month, I’m going to be running a small school–a few days for a few dozen startup founders… For those that won’t be able to make it, I’ll be recording the session and editing it down into something I can share here on the blog for free a few months later.
Below, you can stream those 15 free recordings, each of which runs 18–25 minutes. We’ve embedded the first segment, “Freelancer or Entrepreneur?.” Further down you’ll find links to the remaining ones, or you can get them on SoundCloud and iTunes. Godin’s “Startup School” will be added to our collection of Free Online Business Courses, where you’ll also find the useful YCombinator course, How to Start a Startup.
A black quarterback refuses to stand during the national anthem—a song, incidentally, written by a “patriot” who was also a “bigot” and slaveowner, “vehemently opposed to abolition.” The quarterback declares that he will not “show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” The quarterback is told he has disrespected the country, the police, and the military. His critics become enraged, apoplectic. He is told he should leave the country. He is mocked by thousands of people who point to his wealth and privileged, adoptive upbringing. An upbringing among white people. Such success, the underlying logic goes, and such a childhood should have made the quarterback patriotic, grateful, colorblind.…
What if the quarterback had not grown up privileged, but in one of many communities of color that bear the brunt of well-documented but mostly ignored police violence and institutional discrimination and impoverishment? How would his actions be received then? We can imagine much the same, given the reaction to earlier, less-privileged sports figures, to Black Lives Matter protesters around the country, and to movements of the past. (Until last year, nine men in South Carolina still bore convictions for trespassing after their sit-in protests in 1961.) Protesting the country’s racist past and present—like protesting the country’s wars, inequality, or environmental depredations—is criminal, we’re told, blasphemous, tantamount to treason… or terrorism. The nation is innocent of all charges, and the protestors are bitter, naive, hateful, and worse. For readers of James Baldwin, it all sounds terribly familiar.
Baldwin’s is a difficult literary legacy: while we rejoice that he is still so often read, we lament that so many of his contemporary observations remain relevant. In 1962, Baldwin published an essay in The Progressive in the form of a letter to his nephew, James. Later collected in The Fire Next Time, the letter provided the inspiration for Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent bestseller, Between the World and Me, written as a letter to his then 15-year-old son. In the video above—from this January’s star-studded MLK Now celebration—Chris Rock reads Baldwin’s passionate letter, itself an act of protest, unpatriotic, if you like, in which he levies the same charges against the nation as Colin Kaepernick has fifty-four years later.
“This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen,” writes Baldwin, “and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.”
Now, my dear namesake, these innocent and well meaning people, your countrymen, have caused you to be born under conditions not far removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago. I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, “No, this is not true. How bitter you are,” but I am writing this letter to you to try to tell you something about how to handle them, for most of them do not yet really know that you exist. I know the conditions under which you were born for I was there. Your countrymen were not there and haven’t made it yet. Your grandmother was also there and no one has ever accused her of being bitter. I suggest that the innocent check with her. She isn’t hard to find. Your countrymen don’t know that she exists either, though she has been working for them all their lives.
Baldwin’s ironic insistence on the country’s “innocence” is complex, his language filled with the cosmic imagery of the jeremiad. The people Baldwin speaks of really are in a sense “innocent,” in that they too are victims, “still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.” People, as Coates put it, trapped in an unreal dream. “We cannot be free,” he writes, “until they are free.” With the coming of civil rights-era fights against racism, however, “those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality.”
Nonetheless, he urges his nephew to stay and “with love… force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.” Despite the grim, prophetic tenor of his message, Baldwin ends on a note of hope, one that recognizes love of country not as sentimental, ritualized loyalty pledges, but as a struggle and a reckoning with that country’s ugly truths:
For this is your home, my friend. Do not be driven from it. Great men have done great things here and will again and we can make America what America must become.
The art of audio engineering is mostly a dark one, an alchemy performed behind closed studio doors by people who speak a technical language most of us don’t recognize. That is until recently. Musicians amateur and professional have had to get behind the controls themselves and learn how to record their own music, a function of decimated studio budgets and easily available digital versions of once rarified and prohibitively expensive analog equipment. As with all technological developments that put more control into the hands of laypeople, the results are mixed: a proliferation of quirky, interesting, homemade music, yes, and artists with total control over their production methods and the means to release their music when and how they please…
But with the democratization of recording technology, I fear we may begin to forget what really great, really expensive, audio engineering sounds like, an unheard-of consideration in the fifties and sixties, when the process may as well have been magic to most record buyers, and when engineer Rudy Van Gelder recorded some of the greatest—and best sounding—jazz albums ever made. A Love Supreme? That was Van Gelder. Also Miles Davis’ Walkin’, Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, Sonny Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus, Horace Silver’s Song for My Father… Dexter Gordon, Donald Byrd, Wayne Shorter, Art Blakey…. You’re getting the idea. “Thelonious Monk composed a tribute to Van Gelder’s home studio,” writes The Guardian, and “recorded it there in 1954.”
What made Van Gelder’s albums so amazing, his skills so in-demand? Hear for yourself, in the incredible playlist below featuring 508 hours of music recorded by the man. (Need Spotify? Download it here.) We can also let the engineer—who died at his New Jersey home and studio at 91 last Thursday—tell us himself in rare interviews, and demystify some of the intrinsic properties of the recording process. “When people talk about my albums,” Van Gelder said, “they often say the music has ‘space.’ I tried to reproduce a sense of space in the overall sound picture.” His use of “specific microphones” located around the room to create “a sensation of dimension and depth” show us that recording isn’t simply reproducing the sound of the instruments and players, but of the space around them, which is why studio owners spend millions to build acoustically treated rooms.
But for all his professionalism and pioneering use of top equipment like German-made Neumann microphones, we should note that Van Gelder got his start, and did some of his best work, in his bedroom, so to speak. The fastidious recording engineer, who wore gloves while recording and dressed like a corporate accountant, actually worked as an optometrist by day for over a decade, making records, The New York Times writes, “out of a studio in his parents’ living room in Hackensack, N.J. Not until 1959—by which time he had already engineered some of the most celebrated recordings in jazz history—could he afford to make engineering his full-time occupation.”
That same studio in Van Gelder’s parents’ living room is the one to which Monk paid homage in ’54. Not only that, but like many of today’s self-taught home engineers, Van Gelder “was involved in every aspect of making records, from preparation to mastering.” Which goes to show, perhaps, that maybe great engineering, like great musicianship, isn’t about access to expensive gear or highly specialized training. Maybe it’s about something else. Van Gelder “had the final say in what the records sounded like, and he was, in the view of countless producers and listeners, better at that than anyone.” How? Aside from vague talk of “space” and “dimension,” writes Tape Op, Van Gelder “never discussed his techniques,” even in an interview with the respected recording magazine. Maybe there really was a kind of magic involved.
We can learn much about how a historical period viewed the abilities of its children by studying its children’s literature. Occupying a space somewhere between the purely didactic and the nonsensical, most children’s books published in the past few hundred years have attempted to find a line between the two poles, seeking a balance between entertainment and instruction. However, that line seems to move closer to one pole or another depending on the prevailing cultural sentiments of the time. And the very fact that children’s books were hardly published at all before the early 18th century tells us a lot about when and how modern ideas of childhood as a separate category of existence began.
Grenby notes that “the reasons for this sudden rise of children’s literature” and its rapid expansion into a booming market by the early 1800s “have never been fully explained.” We are free to speculate about the social and pedagogical winds that pushed this historical change.
Or we might do so, at least, by examining the children’s literature of the Victorian era, perhaps the most innovative and diverse period for children’s literature thus far by the standards of the time. And we can do so most thoroughly by surveying the thousands of mid- to late 19th century titles at the University of Florida’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature. Their digitized collectioncurrently holds over 6,000 books free to read online from cover to cover, allowing you to get a sense of what adults in Britain and the U.S. wanted children to know and believe.
Several genres flourished at the time: religious instruction, naturally, but also language and spelling books, fairy tales, codes of conduct, and, especially, adventure stories—pre-Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew examples of what we would call young adult fiction, these published principally for boys. Adventure stories offered a (very colonialist) view of the wide world; in series like the Boston-published Zig Zag and English books like Afloat with Nelson, both from the 1890s, fact mingled with fiction, natural history and science with battle and travel accounts. But there is another distinctive strain in the children’s literature of the time, one which to us—but not necessarily to the Victorians—would seem contrary to the imperialist young adult novel.
For most Victorian students and readers, poetry was a daily part of life, and it was a central instructional and storytelling form in children’s lit. The A.L.O.E.’s Bible Picture Book from 1871, above, presents “Stories from the Life of Our Lord in Verse,” written “simply for the Lord’s lambs, rhymes more readily than prose attracting the attention of children, and fastening themselves on their memories.” Children and adults regularly memorized poetry, after all. Yet after the explosion in children’s publishing the former readers were often given inferior examples of it. The author of the Bible Picture Book admits as much, begging the indulgence of older readers in the preface for “defects in my work,” given that “the verses were made for the pictures, not the pictures for the verses.”
This is not an author, or perhaps a type of literature, one might suspect, that thinks highly of children’s aesthetic sensibilities. We find precisely the opposite to be the case in the wonderful Elfin Rhymes from 1900, written by the mysterious “Norman” with “40 drawings by Carton Moorepark.” Whoever “Norman” may be (or why his one-word name appears in quotation marks), he gives his readers poems that might be mistaken at first glance for unpublished Christina Rossetti verses; and Mr. Moorepark’s illustrations rival those of the finest book illustrators of the time, presaging the high quality of Caldecott Medal-winning books of later decades. Elfin Rhymes seems like a rare oddity, likely published in a small print run; the care and attention of its layout and design shows a very high opinion of its readers’ imaginative capabilities.
This title is representative of an emerging genre of late Victorian children’s literature, which still tended on the whole, as it does now, to fall into the trite and formulaic. Elfin Rhymes sits astride the fantasy boom at the turn of the century, heralded by hugely popular books like Frank L. Baum’s Wizard of Oz series and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. These, the Harry Potters of their day, made millions of young people passionate readers of modern fairy tales, representing a slide even further away from the once quite narrow, “remorselessly instructional… or deeply pious” categories available in early writing for children, as Grenby points out.
Where the boundaries for kids’ literature had once been narrowly fixed by Latin grammar books and Pilgrim’s Progress, by the end of the 19th century, the influence of science fiction like Jules Verne’s, and of popular supernatural tales and poems, prepared the ground for comic books, YA dystopias, magician fiction, and dozens of other children’s literature genres we now take for granted, or—in increasingly large numbers—we buy to read for ourselves. Enter the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature here, where you can browse several categories, search for subjects, authors, titles, etc, see full-screen, zoomable images of book covers, download XML versions, and read all of the over 6,000 books in the collection with comfortable reader views. Find more classics in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.
In the winter of 2012, just before Christmas, a carful of Britons made their way through the snow to a house in rural France. The roads would soon close, but no matter; they’d planned to make some apple crumbles, do some drawing, and enjoy some conversation. This may all sound normal enough, but the car didn’t contain your average cottage-staying holidaymakers: the critic and filmmaker Colin MacCabe rode in it, as did Tilda Swinton, the actress as famed for her performances as for her range of artistic and intellectual interests. They’d come to shoot a documentary on the occupant of the house at which they’d arrived: artist, critic, writer, and self-described “storyteller” John Berger.
The novel G.won Berger the Booker prize in 1972 (half of the prize money from which he famously donated to Britain’s Black Panther Party), but most of his readers encounter him through that same year’s Ways of Seeing, a text on the ideology of images that ranks among the twenty most influential academic books of all time.
He and Swinton first became friends in the late 1980s, when she played a small part in a film based on one of his short stories, in which he himself also appeared. “The old intellectual and the young actress immediately formed a close bond,” writes The Independent’s Geoffrey McNab.
“Both were born in London, on 5 November — Berger in 1926, Swinton in 1960 — and their shared birthday has, as Swinton puts it, ‘formed a bedrock to our complicity, the practical fantasy of twinship.’ ” This they discuss in the McCabe-directed “Ways of Listening,” the first of a quartet of segments that constitute the new documentary The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger, a co-production of Birkbeck, University of London’s Derek Jarman Lab.“Sometimes I think it’s as though, in another life, we met or did something,” says Berger as he draws Swinton’s portrait. “We are aware of it in some department which isn’t memory, although it’s quite close to memory. Maybe, in another life, we… touched together.”
“Ways of Listening” captures an extended conversation between Berger and Swinton, though it also features their narration. In this scene, Berger reads from his recent meditation on the practice of drawing for his book Bento’s Sketchbook: “We who draw do so not only to make something visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.” (Swinton, for her part, reads from Spinoza.) But the talk returns to what brought them together in the first place. “Maybe we made an appointment to see each other again, in this life,” Berger proposes. “The fifth of November. But it wasn’t the same year. That didn’t matter. We weren’t in that kind of time.”
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