Behind the sunlit arches of amber stone and their elongated shadows, behind the marble busts poised lonesome in the air, behind the ivy-crept porticos sitting empty with umbra, there lies a self-portrait of the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico. His aged quilt-like face is the last sight for you to
“Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! We might perhaps have most of Othello; and a
It’s unusual to see butterflies used as a metaphor for tragedy. Within the framework of the English language at least, they’ve enjoyed being symbols for beauty, freedom, and transformation—the English poet John Clare’s “lovely insect.” Perhaps the closest to an inversion we have to that established