from the studio

VINCENT VAN GOGH

“I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.”

ITALO CALVINO, IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT, A TRAVELER, 1979

The sea urchin, the little veil, the two strangers: the color black continues to appear to me in circumstances bound to attract my attention, messages that I interpret as summons from the night.  I realize that for a long time I have tended to reduce the presence of darkness in my life.  The doctors’ prohibition of going out after sunset has confined me for months within the boundaries of the daytime world.  But this is not all: the fact is that I find in the day’s light, in this diffused, pale, almost shadowless luminosity, a darkness deeper than the night’s.

PAUL HARDING, TINKERS, 2009

On the seventh day, Howard turned off the trail and sat by the river and smoked a pipeful of the tobacco that he had packed for the hermit.  As he smoked, he listened to the voices in the rapids.  They murmured about a place somewhere deep in the woods where a set of bones lay on a bed of moss, above which a troop of mournful flies had kept vigil the previous autumn until the frosts came and they, too, had succumbed.