The Sheltering Sky
by Jim Sabiston
“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
¯ Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
Preparing some stock for a new gallery and ran across this fav of mine which I never shared here. These dune images always bring to mind some infinite element of time and space and make it somehow tangible. I never tire of it.
Comments
11 commentsI love the way you compose and present these scenes, and I do think I understand those combined feelings of infinity and tangibility.
The tint and the vignette, along with your control of contrast all give this a timeless feeling, as relevant now as it would have been decades ago, recording it on a wet glass plate.
Interesting quote. Seems that the boundaries of time are just artifacts of our limited individual memories and lives. It's not life that is short; it's only our individual grasp on it.
Peter
Nick Bristol
Lone Rock, WI