There are a lot of humans. Teeming is perhaps an unkind word, but when 8 billion people cram themselves on to a planet that, three centuries before, held less than a tenth of that number, it seems apt. Eight billion hot-breathed individuals, downloading apps and piling into buses and shoving their plasticky waste into bins – it is a stupefying...
In a 1985 essay on Susan Sontag, her friend the translator and poet Richard Howard noted that one of Sontag’s preferred techniques of fiction was the mise en abime—the repetition of forms and elements such that “the story is inlaid within the story.”
It’s a grey November day; rain gently pocks the surface of the tidal pools. There is not much to see in this East Sussex nature reserve – a few gulls, a little grebe, a solitary wader on the shore – but already my breathing has slowed to the rhythm of the water lapping the shingle, my shoulders have dropped and I feel imbued with a sense of calm.
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Those aren’t just lyrics from the Queen song “Bohemian Rhapsody.” They’re also the questions that the brain must constantly answer while processing streams of visual signals from the eyes and purely mental pictures bubbling out of the imagination.
Somewhere near the center of Nevada, on the western slope of the Toiyabe Range, there’s a little meadow beside a creek running down from the mountains. In 2019, long before I had ever been there, a man named James Fredette drove his mobile home down the gravel road from the highway and went fishing. It was a lucky day: He caught three big rainbow trout. Then, as the light turned golden and began to fade from the canyon while Fredette packed up his gear, he thought, why not, and walked back down to the creek to try his luck panning for gold. He turned up a few nuggets, right there. Yes, it was a very lucky day.
This week’s 10 Images With features 12 images by Los Angeles-based Director & Photographer, Ravi Vora, whose idylic scenes of glassy mountain lakes,...
STILL DREAMING about my trip the other week, I’m beginning to miss the tranquility of quiet summer nights & nestling...
CONTINUING WITH OUR FLORAL AFFAIR this spring, come away with us to Keukenhof Gardens in Lisse, Netherlands. Otherwise known as...
The poetry of Iceland lies, in part, with the ferocious fires, volcanic landscapes, and its counter: brisk ice. And through...
