I also painted a study of a seascape, nothing but a bit of sand, sea, sky, grey and lonely - sometime[s] I feel a need for that silence - where there’s nothing but the grey sea - with an occasional seabird. But otherwise, no other voice than the murmur of the waves.
Vincent van Gogh, from a letter to his brother Theo, 17 September 1882
And then one student said that happiness is what happens when you go to bed on the hottest night of the summer, a night so hot you can’t even wear a tee-shirt and you sleep on top of the sheets instead of under them, although try to sleep is probably more accurate. And then at some point late, late, late at night, say just a bit before dawn, the heat finally breaks and the night turns into cool and when you briefly wake up, you notice that you’re almost chilly, and in your groggy, half-consciousness, you reach over and pull the sheet around you and just that flimsy sheet makes it warm enough and you drift back off into a deep sleep. And it’s that reaching, that gesture, that reflex we have to pull what’s warm - whether it’s something or someone - toward us, that feeling we get when we do that, that feeling of being sad in the world and ready for sleep, that’s happiness.
Paul Schmidtberger, Design Flaws of the Human Condition
Is it really that bad if someone sees who you are? Why is it humans have a problem with letting someone else see that they are human?
Joseph Gogler
