Borrowed lines

"This line (the line of beauty) must unfold without breaking in our head, but it is not possible for the hand to trace it without interruption and without stopping and starting several times."

-- Joseph Joubert

Life at last managed of its own accord to settle itself into a working arrangement. After so many years of effort to find one's drift, the drift found the seeker, and slowly swept him forward and back, with a steady progress oceanwards. Such lessons as summer taught, winter tested, and one had only to watch the apparent movement of the stars in order to guess one's declination.
--Henry Adams

(courtesy of antonia)

This atmospheric brown, which was entirely alien to the Renaissance, is the unrealest colour that there is. It is one major colour that does not exist in the rainbow.

A pure brown lies outside the possibilities of nature that we know. All the greenish-browns, silvery, moist brown and deep gold tones..have the common quality that they strip Nature of her tangible actuality.

They contain, therefore, what is almost a religious profession of faith..Destiny, God, the meaning of life. Brown, then, became the characteristic colour of the soul, and more particular , of a historically disposed soul..By this is meant that it makes the atmosphere of the pictured space signify directedness and future.

--Spengler, Decline of the West