Hieronymus Bosch Quotes

If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.

Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist. To make living itself an art, that is the goal.

Surely every one realizes, at some point along the way, that he is capable of living a far better life than the one he has chosen.

Certainly paradise, whatever, wherever it be, contains flaws. (Paradisical flaws, if you like.) If it did not, it would be incapable of drawing the hearts of men or angels.

That Hieronymus Bosch. What a weirdo.

No matter how many heavy-metal album covers you’ve seen, how many Hieronymus Bosch prints of the tortures of Hell, or even the scene in Indiana Jones where the Nazi’s face melts off, you cannot be prepared to view a body being cremated. Seeing a flaming human skull is intense beyond your wildest flights of imagination.

We create our fate everyday

Out yonder they may curse, revile, and torture one another, defile all the human instincts, make a shambles of creation (if it were in their power), but here, no, here, it is unthinkable, here there is abiding peace, the peace of God, and the serene security created by a handful of good neighbors living at one with the creature world.

I swear, if I could eat my children, I would. I'd consume them like some beast in a Hieronymus Bosch painting, but in a friendlier, more momlike way. Their little bodies make me salivate. It takes everything I have not to swallow them whole.

She discovered what others know only too well in a cynical way, that people prefer to believe in and worship a god who is remote rather than live out the godlike nature which is their inherent being.

And no one sets about saving the world unless he has first experienced the miracle of personal salvation.

Sweet or bitter, I am now convinced that all experience is enriching and rewarding. Above all, instructive.

Surely every one realizes, at some point along the way, that he is capable of living a far better life than the one he has chosen. What stays him, usually, is the fear of the sacrifices involved. (Even to relinquish his chains seems like a sacrifice.) yet everyone knows that nothing is accomplished without sacrifice.

If it be knowledge or wisdom one is seeking, then one had better go direct to the source. And the source is not the scholar or philosopher, not the master, saint, or teacher, but life itself - direct experience of life. The same is true for art. Here, too, we an dispense with "the masters.

There’s a reason why the story of the ghetto should never come with a photo. The Third World slum is a nightmare that defies beliefs or facts, even the ones staring right at you. A vision of hell that twists and turns on itself and grooves to its own soundtrack. Normal rules do not apply here. Imagination then, dream, fantasy. You visit a ghetto, particularly a ghetto in West Kingston, and it immediately leaves the real to become this sort of grotesque, something out of Dante or the infernal painting of Hieronymus Bosch. It’s a rusty red chamber of hell that cannot be described so I will not try to describe it. It cannot be photographed because some parts of West Kingston, such as Rema, are in the grip of such bleak and unremitting repulsiveness that the inherent beauty of the photographic process will lie to you about just how ugly it really is.

That Hieronymus Bosch. What a weirdo.

Artists never thrive in colonies.

Between laughs I could hear my mother’s words ringing in my ears. “Why don't you write something that will sell?

No, we are never alone. But one has to live apart to know it for the truth.

If you do not know where you are going, any road will take you there.”*

Big Sur? Why it's just like every other place! . . . a profound truth, since a place is only what you make it, what you bring to it.

The ideal community, in a sense, would be the loose, fluid aggregation of individuals who elected to be alone and detached in order to be at one with themselves and all that lives and breathes. It would be a God-filled community, even if none of its members believe in (a) God. It would be a paradise, even though the word had long disappeared from our vocabulary.

Surely every one realizes, at some point along the way, that he is capable of living a far better life than the one he has chose. What stays him, usually, is the fear of the sacrifices involved. (Even to relinquish his chains seems like a sacrifice.) Yet everyone knows that nothing is accomplished without sacrifice.

Eccentric and secret genius that he was, Bosch not only moved the heart, but scandalized it into full awareness. The sinister and monstrous things that he brought forth are the hidden creatures of our inward self-love: he externalizes the ugliness within, and so his misshapen demons have an effect beyond curiosity. We feel a hateful kinship with them. The Ship of Fools is not about other people. It is about us.

. . . They had skies of pure azure and walls of fog moving in and out of the canyons with invisible feet, hills in winter of emerald green and in summer mountain upon mountain of pure gold. They had even more, for there was ever the unfathomable silence of the forest, the blazing immensity of the Pacific, days drenched with sun and nights spangled with stars. . .

There is one other thing to know … when you have expressed yourself to the fullest, then and only then will it dawn upon you that everything has already been expressed, not in words alone but in deed, and that all you need really do is say Amen!

Better keep the young on lemons and lavender until they've reached the age of discretion.

Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel were two early Flemish artists who specialized in bizarre allegorical paintings.

No. Hieronymus Bosch. Very old-timer. Very good. Pieter Brueghel worked on that too.

The idea of a clean war, like that of a clean bomb or an intelligent missile, this whole war conceived as a technological extrapolation of the brain is a sure sign of madness. It is like those characters in Hieronymus Bosch with a glass bell or a soap bubble around their head as a sign of their mental debility. A war enclosed in a glass coffin, like Snow White, purged of any carnal contamination or warrior's passion. A clean war which ends up in an oil slick.

The field has eyes, the wood has ears. I want to see, to be silent and listen

A writer often has two great surprises in store for him: the first is the lack of proper response to his efforts; the second is the overwhelming nature of the response when it does come. One is just as bad as the other.

This is the lone-American type I admire, the kind I believe in, can get along with, and whom I vote for even though he’s never nominated for office. The democratic man our poets sang of but who, alas, is being rapidly exterminated, along with the buffalo, the moose and the elk, the great bear, the eagle, the condor, the mountain lion. The sort of American that never starts a war, never raises a feud, never draws the color line, never tries to lord it over his fellow-man, never yearns for higher education, never holds a grudge against his neighbor, never treats an artist shabbily and never turns a beggar away. Often untutored and unlettered, he sometimes has more of the poet and the musician in him, philosopher too, than those who are acclaimed as such. His whole way of life is aesthetic. What marks him as different, sometimes ridiculous, is his serenity and originality. That he aspires to be none other than himself, is this not the essence of wisdom?

Only when we are truly alone does the fullness and richness of life reveal itself to us. In simplifying our lives, everything acquires a significance hitherto unknown. When we are one with ourselves the most insignificant blade of grass assumes its proper place in the universe

I have always embraced this concept, and it paid off now, as Meza proved to be wonderfully creative in both Spanish and English. He ran through an impressive list of standards, and then his artistic side took full flower and he called me things that had never before existed, except possibly in a parallel universe designed by Hieronymus Bosch. The performance took on an added air of supernatural improbability because Meza’s voice was so weak and husky, but he never allowed that to slow him. I was frankly awed, and Deborah seemed to be, too, because we both simply stood and listened until Meza finally wore down and tapered off with, “Cocksucker.

Whereas painters of the early and middle 1400s enriched their own (and their countrymen's) understanding of the Gospel by recreating it in reality, their successors used this technique to study (and broaden) their entire world view. Hieronymus Bosch mastered a whole genre by merging the realism of Flemish painting with fantastic allegories of the human condition. His pictures of vermin and birds in men's clothing, atrocities, and weirdly juxtaposed objects use the realism of the earlier masters as a means of stark caricature. It was in this form, the most extreme possible, that character and moral differentiation were introduced into the realm of realistic depiction.

You will then be ready to undergo initiation: an ordeal imposed by the Brotherhood of Fools and Simpletons. Three questions will be put to you. Just three. The first: 'How would you order the world if you were given the powers of the creator?' the second: 'What is it you desire that you do not already possess?' The third: 'Say something that will truly astonish us!' If you answer these satisfactorily you are then to return to your birthplace, sit quietly with hands folded, and meditate on the needs of all God's creatures. . . . When you know what it is they need . . . you are to report back to the Brotherhood and dissolve the order.

If it was a mistake not to finish school (it wasn't!), it was an even worse mistake to go to work. ("Work! The word was so painful he couldn't bring himself to pronounce it," says a character in one of Cossery's books.) Until I was almost eighteen I had know freedom, a relative freedom, which is more than most people ever get to know. (It included "freedom of speech," which has hung over into my writing.) Then, like an idiot, I entered the lists. Overnight, as it were, the bit was put in my mouth, I was saddled, and the cruel rowels were dug into my tender flanks. It didn't take long to realize what a shithouse I had let myself into. Every new job I took was a step further in the direction of "murder, death and blight." I think of them still as prisons, whorehouses, lunatic asylums: the Atlas Portland Cement Co., the Federal Reserve Bank, the Bureau of Economic Research, the Charles Williams Mail Order House, the Western Union Telegraph Co., etc. To think that I wasted ten years of my life serving these anonymous lords and masters! That look of rapture in Pookie's eyes, that look of supreme admiration which I reserved for such as Eddie Carney, Lester Reardon, Johnny Paul: it was gone, lost, buried. It returned only when, much later, I reached the point where I was completely cut off, thoroughly destitute, utterly abandoned. When I became the nameless one, wandering as a mendicant through the streets of my own home town. Then I began to see again, to look with eyes of wonder, eyes of love, into the eyes of my fellow-man.

Margaret felt her anger taking control of her in a way she had never experienced before, jabbing in and out of her eyes, her mouth, her stomach, as if she were some poor soul snagged by demons in a Hieronymus Bosch painting…

Hellions look sort of like the little demons in that Hieronymus Bosch painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. Some look pretty human. Some look like the green devils on old absinthe bottles. Some are like what monsters puke up after a long weekend of eating other monsters. Buer looks like a cuttlefish in a Hugo Boss suit and smells like a pet-store Dumpster.

Anyway, in the interim since I turned writer—a good thirty years—I have hobnobbed with all varieties of man, from the highest to the lowest. I have know intimately saints and seers as well as those whom we disdainfully refer to as "the dregs of humanity." I don't know to which group I am more indebted. But I do know this—if we were suddenly faced with an overwhelming calamity, if I had to choose just one man with whom I would share the rest of my life in the midst of chaos and destruction, I would pick that unknown Mexican peon whom my friend Doner brought one day to clear the weeds in our garden. I no longer remember his name, for he was truly without name.

The lurid descriptions of what lay between death and salvation conjure up a Hieronymus Bosch vision of hell, reflecting the universal horror of death and the desperate wish for eternal life. The ancient Egyptians’ fears ranged from the all-too-familiar afflictions of thirst and starvation to the peculiar horror of an upside-down world in which they would have to walk on their heads, drink urine, and eat excrement. The Coffin Texts show the human imagination at its most fevered. The

Paradise or no paradise, I have the very definite impression that the people of this vicinity are striving to live up to the grandeur and nobility which is such an integral part of the setting. They behave as if it were a privilege to live here, as if it were by an act of grace they found themselves here. The place itself is so overwhelmingly bigger, greater, than anyone could hope to make it that it engenders a humility and reverence not frequently met with in Americans. There is nothing to improve on in the surroundings, the tendency is to set about improving oneself.

Highland Avenue in suburban Philadelphia

The report paints a particularly frightening picture of the Piedmont region, stretching from Raleigh through Charlotte to Atlanta, with the overall urban footprint nearly tripling in size by 2060. Why? Because of the lure of the New South boomtowns, the car-friendly culture, and the proximity to the mountains and seas. The so-called Piedmont Megaregion would become an uninterrupted, four-hundred-mile ribbon of concrete with Interstate 85 as its spine. Metro Atlanta alone would stretch from Alabama to South Carolina. In 2014, about 7 percent of the Southeast was covered in concrete. By 2060, 18 percent will be. A map of the futuristic landscape accompanies the report. On it, Atlanta looks like an angry fever blister anchoring the southwestern end of the corridor with smaller, yet equally angry red and yellow splotches (Greenville, Charlotte, Greensboro, Durham, Raleigh) running to the northeast. The editors fail to credit Hieronymus Bosch for the map.

Up all the wrong alleys, down all the wrong streets—yet how right I was!—until I came to the end of my tether.

I keep getting stuck on Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Some call it The Millennium.

I swear, if I could eat my children, I would. I’d consume them like some beast in a Hieronymus Bosch painting, but in a friendlier, more momlike way. Their little bodies make me salivate. It takes everything I have not to swallow them whole.

Right in front of us on a screen that looks to be at least twenty feet high and twice as wide, the extremely awful movie Myra Breckinridge is being shown in very lurid living color. As Raquel Welch, Mae West, and John Houston cavort before us like overblown figures from a fever dream by Hieronymus Bosch, Gram and I look at one another in horror. Both of us know we have entered another dimension. Gram Parsons and I are now in the twilight zone.

In this vale of tears we must take what we're sent, feathery, leathery, lovely or bent.

The begging snapped into a sharp muffled shriek, just one, just the one terrible muted cry. Krista couldn’t move. She stared at the door as if it were a nightmare painting from Hieronymus Bosch’s personal, tortured hell. Then

I read War and Peace, I read Madame Bovary, I read Fathers and Sons, The Red and the Black, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov. I read Hunger, Anna Karenina, Don Quixote. I read Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, Sexus, Nexus, Plexus, Quiet Days in Clichy. I read Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. My friend Paul is a character in this one.

By dawn, the ship was off Le Havre, and by eight thirty, Wells found himself, swaddled in his newly issued greatcoat, following Sergeant Stubb through the chaotic harbor scene. Hieronymus Bosch could not have done it justice—twisting avenues lined by bales of barbed wire the height of houses, teetering mountains of crates and barrels, whinnying horses and skittish mules, a thousand shouting voices, little French boys begging for a cigarette or a bit of the breakfast the swarms of soldiers had just been issued: tins of bully beef, along with a biscuit as hard and thick as a fist.

Dylan, Duende, Death and Lorca Does Bob Dylan have Duende? DUENDE dancers perform moving, unique, unrepeatable performances Does Bob Dylan have duende? Do you have duende? What is duende? Duende is a Spanish word with two meanings. A duende is a goblin or a pixie that probably lives at the bottom of the garden and gives three wishes to old ladies who deserve a break. The duende was best defined by Spain’s great poet Federico García Lorca during a lecture he gave in New York in 1929 on Andalusian music known as cante jondo, or deep voice. ‘The duende,’ he said, ‘is a momentary burst of inspiration, the blush of all that is truly alive, all that the performer is creating at a certain moment.’ The difference between a good and a bad singer is that the good singer has the duende and the bad singer doesn’t. ‘There are no maps nor disciplines to help us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned.’ Some critics say Bob Dylan does not have a great voice. But more than any other performer since the birth of recorded music, Dylan has revealed the indefinable, spine-tingling something captured in Lorca’s interpretation of duende. ‘It is an inexplicable power of attraction, the ability to send waves of emotion through those watching and listening to them.’ ‘The duende,’ he continues, ‘resembles what Goethe called the demoniacal. It manifests itself principally among musicians and poets of the spoken word, for it needs the trembling of the moment and then a long silence.’ painting off hell by Hieronymus Bosch Hell & Hieronymus Bosch Four elements can be found in Lorca’s vision of duende: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death and a dash of the diabolical. I agree with Lorca that duende manifests principally among singers, but would say that same magic may touch us when confronted by great paintings: Picasso’s Guernica, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, the paintings of heaven and hell by Hieronymus Bosch. The duende is found in the bitter roots of human existence, what Lorca referred to as ‘the pain which has no explanation.’ Artists often feel sad without knowing why. They sense the cruel inevitability of fate. They smell the coppery scent of death. All artists live in a permanent state of angst knowing that what they have created could have been better. Death with Duende It is not surprising that Spain found a need for the word duende. It is the only country where death in the bullring is a national spectacle, the only nation where death is announced by the explosion of trumpets and drums. The bullring, divided in sol y sombre – the light and shade, is the perfect metaphor for life and death, a passing from the light into darkness. Every matador who ever lived had duende and no death is more profound than death in the bullring.

It sounds so simple: break it up! get a divorce! separate! But what about the child? Where would I stand, in court, claiming the right to keep my daughter? “You? A man with your reputation?” I could just see the judge foaming at the mouth. Even to do away with myself would not remedy matters. We had to go on. We had to fight it out. No, that’s not the word. Iron things out. (With what? A flatiron?) Compromise! That’s better. It’s not either! Then surrender! Admit you’re licked. Let her walk over you. Pretend you don’t feel, don’t hear, don’t see. Pretend you’re dead.

She fell into it naturally and unassumingly, more as an angelic being than as a doer of good deeds. In performing her duties she innocently believed that she was awakening the afflicted to the nature and existence of the true source of power and health, or peace and joy. But, like all who have made the experiment, she gradually came to perceive that people are not interested in the divine power which is theirs but only in finding an intermediary who will undo the havoc which they have wrought through stupidity or meanness of soul. She discovered what others know only too well in a cynical way, that people prefer to believe in and worship a god who is remote rather than live out the godlike nature which is their inherent being. She found that people prefer the easy path, the lazy, irresponsible path, of confession, repentance and sinning anew to the hard but direct path which leads, not to the Cross, but to life more abundant, life everlasting.

Bosch was not possessed by a deranged spirit but the possessor of a cool, calculating mind. His supreme mastery of the arts is proved by his ability to paint cerebrally constructed devils, of which the component parts each has its own meaning.

But to a ten year old it didn’t matter. Whatever the measurements were, they were the dimensions of fear.

Bosch was not possessed by a deranged spirit but the possessor of a cool, calculating mind. His supreme mastery of the arts is proved by his ability to paint cerebrally constructed devils, of which the component parts each has its own meaning. This, in short, is genius, and modern art historians who see Bosch as a surrealist have been led astray by it. Bosch had a keen eye for the demonic element in what he observed (e.g. in colours and human faces) and he understood and knew exactly how to make use of it and achieve the desired effects.

I DON’T REMEMBER what year it was that I started noticing apocalyptic language in the art classes I taught at Stanford. I just remember the student who made a detailed, animated triptych based on The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch. The three collages got darker and bleaker from left to right. “It’s kind of like…the sunset of humanity,” the student said, laughing nervously. Or the student who, standing in front of a projector screen showing his 3-D project and tasked with explaining it, said in a small but tortured voice, “Well, I just feel like the world is ending and all that,” at which everyone mutely nodded. I remember thinking it seemed vulgar to continue on talking about vectors and shaders after that. And I remember wanting to run across the classroom and give that student a hug.

What I say is, if we are going to meet one another with a view or an awareness of our diversity and divergences we will never acquire enough knowledge to deal with one another smoothly and effectively. To get anywhere with another individual one has to cut through to the rock-bottom man, to that common human substratum which exists in all of us. This is not a difficult procedure and certainly doesn't demand of one that he be a psychologist or a mind reader. One doesn't have to know a thing about astrological types, the complexity of their reactions to this or that. There is one simple, direct way to deal with all types, and that is truthfully and honestly.

I gravitated toward music that invoked loneliness in me. Jazz. More to the point, the sound of the jazz saxophone. I started with the essentials—John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter

The paintings, full of dark, hellish landscapes of torture and debauchery, are about chaos and its consequences.

Man is depicted again and again as embracing evil, as being the instigator of his own downfall.

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy

Happy is the man who finds refuge in himself.

The mark of a true artist, I believe, is to create something that can live on in another’s imagination. Hieronymus Bosch certainly accomplished this.

It was in Frank Morgan’s alto sax that I found the soundtrack of my detective. In his sad but uplifting ballad “Lullaby,” written by pianist George Cables, I discovered my detective’s anthem. For many years I played that song at the start of each writing day.

I was writing about a man who every day ventured into the human abyss, whose job took him across landscapes of chaos and its consequences. I was writing the story of a man who confronted horrific evil among men and who all the while wrestled with his own dark currents. From that day on he became Detective Hieronymus Bosch.

woebegone.

Een kunstwerk is nooit meer dan een zwakke afspiegeling van wat de kunstenaar in zijn geest gezien heeft.

Jeroen had gelijk, dacht Aleyt terwijl ze de teugels weer nam en het paard zich in beweging zette. De wereld draait op dwaasheid. Het verlangen om alles beter te maken leeft wel bij enkelen, maar die worden machteloos meegesleept door de willoze massa, die om sinistere redenen verkiest zich een waardeloos leven lang in de misère te blijven wentelen. Als maden in rottend vlees.

No one is born an artist. One elects for it! And when you elect to be the first and last among men you find nothing strange about sleeping with a donkey, putting your paws in the garbage pail, or swallowing reproaches and insults from all the near and dear ones who regard your way of life as a grave mistake.

As they moved on he was offered some STP, a powerful hallucinogenic which had become infamous after five thousand high-dosage tablets had been given away weeks earlier at the Summer Solstice Celebration in Golden Gate Park. The delayed onset of its effects meant a number of users had taken extra hits and ended up in hospital.302 Harrison declined the STP, but his response was seen as a snub. ‘I could see all the spotty youths,’ he recalled, ‘but I was seeing them from a twisted angle. It was like the manifestation of a scene from an Hieronymus Bosch painting, getting bigger and bigger, fish with heads, faces like vacuum cleaners coming out of shop doorways… They were handing me things – like a big Indian pipe with feathers on it, and books and incense – and trying to give me drugs. I remember saying to one guy: “No thanks, I don’t want it.” And then I heard his whining voice saying, “Hey, man – you put me down.” It was terrible. We walked quicker and quicker through the park and in the end we jumped in the limo, said, “Let’s get out of here,” and drove back to the airport.’303 The crowd began to grow hostile as they returned to the limousine, and those outside began rocking the vehicle as their faces pressed against the windows. The narrow escape increased Harrison’s resolve to move away from LSD. ‘That was the turning point for me – that’s when I went right off the whole drug cult and stopped taking the dreaded lysergic acid. I had some in a little bottle – it was liquid. I put it under a microscope, and it looked like bits of old rope. I thought that I couldn’t put that into my brain any more.

Looking at a fragment of "The Millennium" the other day, I pointed out . . . how hallucinatingly real were the oranges.

The oranges of Bosch's "Millennium" . . . exhale this dreamlike reality which constantly eludes us and which is the very substance of life.

This is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa looked out on from the Peak of Darien, this is the face of the earth as the creator intended it to look.

There is a world here as full and rich, as compelling and instructive, as Thoreau found at Walden.

Like the legendary Big Sur: full of violence, horror, incest, broken dreams, despair, loneliness, insanity and frustration of every sort.

Here at Big Sur, at a certain time of the year and a certain time of the day only, a pale blue-green hue pervades the distant hills. . . . It is not only the tone and color of distance, abetted by the magic fall of light, it is a mystical phenomenon, or so I like to think, born of a certain way of looking at the world.

Had we written the history of but a single man in full, we should be able to read in it the history of all men; and had we recorded faithfully the story of but one thing, we should discover in it the story of all things.

What sticks in my crop about this period, when he [Conrad Moricand] was so desperately poor and miserable, is the air of elegance and fastidiousness which clung to him. He always seemed more like a stockbroker weathering a bad period than a man utterly without resources. The clothes he wore, all of excellent cut as well as of the best material, would obviously last another ten years, considering the care and attention he gave them. Even had they been patched, he would still have looked the well-dressed gentleman. Unlike myself, it never occurred to him to pawn or sell his clothes in order to eat. He had need of his good clothes.

But of that instant I knew my wife was right, knew that I had made a grave mistake. In that moment I sensed the leech that Anaïs had tried to get rid of. I saw the spoiled child, the man who had never done an honest stroke of work in his life, the destitute individual who was too proud to beg openly but was not above milking a friend dry. I knew it all, felt it all, and already foresaw the end.

Several times now I have stressed the fact that whatever 'it' is one gets here at Big Sur, one gets it harder, faster, straighter than one would elsewhere. . . . the people here are fundamentally no different than people elsewhere. Their problems are basically the same as those who inhabit the cities, the jungles, the desert or the vast steppes. . . . What is it that makes one's problems (here in Big Sur) assume such a dramatic aspect? Almost melodramatic at times. The place itself has much to do with it. If the soul were to choose an arena in which to stage its agonies, this would be the place for it. One feels exposed — not only to the elements, but to the sight of God. Naked, vulnerable, set agains an overwhelming backdrop of might and majesty, one's problems become magnified because of the proscenium on which the conflict is staged

When you put the book down you feel as if God's own angels had made pipi in your hair.

He was an incurable dandy living the life of a beggar. And living wholly in the past!

To the surgeon his scalpel, to the gravedigger his pick and shovel, to the analyst his dream books, to the fool his dunce cap. As for me, I have a bellyache.

Men will sacrifice their lives to bring about a better world—whatever that may mean—but they will not budge an inch to attain paradise. Nor will they struggle to create a bit of paradise in the hell they find themselves.

I was a ripe prey for "the alligator of ecstasy."  

Our tourists returning from abroad dwell on the poverty and misery of the great masses in Europe, Asia, Africa. They speak with pride of the abundance which we in America share. They talk of efficiency, sanitation, home comforts, high wages, the freedom to move about and to speak one's mind, and so on. They speak of the privileges as if they were American "inventions." (As if there had never been a Greece, a Rome, an Egypt, a China, an India, a Persia.) They never speak of the price we pay for these comforts, for all this progress and abundance. (As if we were free of crime, disease, suicide, infanticide, prostitution, alcoholism, addiction to drugs, military training, aramament races and the obsession with lethal weapons.)

There was an odor about him which I could not help but be aware of. It was a mélange of bay rum, wet ashes and tabac gris, tinctured with a dash of some elusive, elegant perfume. Later these would resolve themselves into one unmistakable scent—the aroma of death.

Hieronymus Bosch

Caravaggio, Francis Bacon, Hieronymus Bosch, Francisco Goya, Henry Fuseli.

El núcleo de la actividad y la creatividad de El Bosco no es el perfeccionamiento de una tradición pictórica sino el desarrollo de un tema con la ayuda del arte de la combinación, que conduce a invenciones e innovaciones iconográficas.