“America… we are a better country than this.”
—Barack Obama
August 2008
35 posts
Goodbye
I am leaving tonight to resume my life in New York. I am dreading the moment I have to say goodbye to Mom. Leaving home gets impossibly difficult as the years pass. I think about these lines from T. S. Eliot:
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
One of the nicest things about being in Santa Monica is to be able to hear Nic Harcourt’s Morning Becomes Eclectic on KCRW live.
“… one of the ironies of modernism is that its idealism has been lost even as its artefacts have increased in value. Once conceived as elements of a shared way of life for many, these objects have become status symbols available only to the wealthy few.”
—Gaby Wood, quoting Michael Webb in Modernist Paradise. I am constantly reminded of this, particularly as I’m getting ready to photograph another Lautner House in the Hollywood Hills and the only Oscar Niemeyer-designed residence in North America, which happens to be in Santa Monica.
Days with My Father is photographer Philip Toledano’s touchingly beautiful journal of life with his 98 year-old father, who has no short term memory.
