One well-considered line is better than all the billions of careless words that will be thrown about today. A contemplative moment of silence is superior to both. — me, 2014

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak. — Baruch Spinoza

? Childhood memories

☝️I was there.

I just have to say there is something ominous about the Fourth of July taking place on a New Moon in Gemini. A moon in Gemini is deeply unstable, as Gemini has a two sided twin nature to it, and this perfectly encapsulates the unstable tension in American society rn.

☝️If it's a good one, which is rare these days.

Here Krafft depicts a scene from the Ossian Cantos. The author of this 18th century Scottish epic, James Macpherson, claimed to have translated the work from Gaelic and that the actual author was Ossian, who lived in the 3rd century.

Goethe incorporated the Ossian Cantos into his "Sorrows of Young Werther," which inspired Krafft's depiction. Daura sits on a rocky island and looks over her shoulder in shock. She sees her husband Armar on the left edge of the picture, throwing himself off a cliff into the raging sea to reach the boat rocking in the waves. In this way he tries to save his wife, who was brought to this lonely island by Erath in revenge. With one hand, Daura supports her dying brother Arindal, whom her husband has fatally wounded through a mistake. In front of the dying man lies a broken arrow that must have hit him. The arrangement of the two figures is reminiscent of a Pietá. Daura's face was borrowed from Botticelli, while the painter based the landscape on Joseph Vernet's romantic seascapes.