"origins of memory", triptych, oil on canvas, 5'h x 12'w, 1989.
i love books - the feel of paper, turning the pages, the smell, and the way memories, while reading them, mingle with the content - they always become more than they are, and maybe that's what the original book-makers intended ...
my first reading of Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations" was in high school some 40+ years ago - it was one of those little books i always dug because you can stick it in your pocket and pull it out anywhere for reprieve, inspiration, diversion, etc ...
appropriately, this one, accompanied me through many walks in the woods where i grew up - usually with my dog-eared copy of "Walden" - and somewhere along the way, when my legs got rubbery, or there was a perfect rock and vista, or the rhythm of my soul was right, i'd back up to a tree and take it all in - a mind, body, spirit thing that comforts unlike anything else - and i've spent a lifetime chasing it through a spectrum of experiences ...
so here we are in 2010 and i'm reading Marcus and Henry again ...
"but i have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine ... we were born to work together, to obstruct is unnatural ..."
M.A., "on the River Gran, among the Quadi"
