Sítios fora do mapa - 3

Les deux Blanches (étude pour les décorations de la villa Kaeser à Genève), 1898. 

The Cultivation of Christmas Trees

There are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),
And the childish - which is not that of the child
For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel

Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.
The child wonders at the Christmas Tree:
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder
At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext;
So that the glittering rapture, the amazement
Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree,
So that the surprises, delight in new possessions
(Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell),
The expectation of the goose or turkey
And the expected awe on its appearance,

So that the reverence and the gaiety
May not be forgotten in later experience,
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,
Or in the piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with a self-conceit
Displeasing to God and disrespectful to children
(And here I remember also with gratitude
St.Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire):

So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas
(By "eightieth" meaning whichever is last)
The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.

- T.S.Eliot, 1954

Bom Natal, Bom Ano.

Forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum.

Thomas Francis Dicksee, Ophelia, 1864.

Sítios fora do mapa - 2

Willy Ronis, Passarelle du Pont des Arts, 1959.

"When we are happy, our imagination is stronger; when we are unhappy our memory works with greater vitality. Suferring makes imagination weak and lazy." 

Natalia Ginzburg, The Complete Stories of Natalia Ginzburg

Diz que é uma espécie de Artémis - 2

Louise Ruth Harriet, Greta Garbo em The Temptress, 1926.