Here is more captive French vin, yesterday there was champagne and today there is some rose in snow, and rose vin and snow do mix well I think.
VreMax: Russian Caviar, French Champagne: This is how we rollin' here in the times of plague and various other unpleasantness. Here is an impromptu al-fresco lunch for two, invo...
This is how we rollin' here in the times of plague and various other unpleasantness.
Here is an impromptu al-fresco lunch for two, involving principally some Russian caviar and a bottle of cheapish French champagne, but also soft cheese, butter, pineapple rings and orange juice for mimosas.
The caviar was Siberian caviar not some filthy and polluted, not to mention depleted, Caspian slop.
This was Lena sturgeon.
Re: Champaign, seemed good enough with evidence of genuine secondary in-bottle fermentation on the taste.. maybe... lively and a note of live yeast on the taste if not on the nose anyway.
Regarding Marquis de Sade himself, he was of course a prolific writer of fiction and a major proponent of back door entry, But did you know, it was he who started the French revolution in earnest by precipitating the storming of La Bastille?
Some time at start of July 1789, crowds in Paris began to congregate around the Bastille. They believed there were people imprisoned in the royal fortress turned prison with whom they sympathized and whom they might liberate from the King's despotic rule.
The crowds, however, did not know that only a few aristocrats were held there, mainly on morals charges, and scarcely deserving liberation in the name of the people. On July 2, the crowds in the street heard a voice, apparently amplified by a megaphone improvised out of a rain spout, shouting that prisoners were being slaughtered and needed rescue. The prisoner to whom that voice belonged was summarily transferred two days later to the Clarenton insane asylum. But it was too late, the crowds stormed the Bastille on July fourteenth.
The man who attempted so outrageous a ruse in order to regain freedom after twelve years of imprisonment we know today as the Marquis de Sade!
(adapted from Forbidden Knowledge by Roger Shattuck)
So three cheers for Marquis de Sade, Hero of the French Revolution!!!
How about this one?
Too soon?
Context
Here is some animal life from my country place, a frog and a bullfinch.
Bullfinch is naturally out of focus because camera wouldn't focus on him because of the twigs.
And a frog, and here the pesky camera does a better job of focusing but still wouldn't quite because of the grass blades!
How's this for a wine lunch on a plastic garden table in October, at my country residence, not locked up for winter yet.
Though wine was pretty good.
So here’s having a whiskey lunch al fresco and trying to crack the nut of this writing - Conclusion by Walter Pater, Whatever is he trying to say.
(the Goode olde Sarky.. or is it Cutty)
QUOTE BEGINS
*This brief "Conclusion" was omitted in the second edition of this book, as I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall. On the whole, I have thought it best to reprint it here, with some slight changes which bring it closer to my original meaning. I have dealt more fully in Marius the Epicurean with the thoughts suggested by it.
Legei pou Herakleitos hoti panta khorei kai ouden menei.
To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without—our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them—the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain by every ray of light and sound—processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us; it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven by many forces; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them—a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flamelike our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.
Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring. There it is no longer the gradual darkening of the eye and fading of colour from the wall,—the movement of the shore-side, where the water flows down indeed, though in apparent rest,—but the race of the mid-stream, a drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought. At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to act upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like a trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions—colour, odour, texture—in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further; the whole scope of observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.
Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren vivificiren. The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us,—for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.
One of the most beautiful passages in the writings of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had always clung about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve—les hommes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.
ENDS
Think I need another glass of cheap whiskey to get to the bottom of it, front or back as the case may be, whichever kindles that sharp flick of experience.
Oops and here it is another 30 gram and another 30 grams and another 30 grams...a veritable trifecta of experience!
Travels in my Bettanin & Venturi artisanal hand-crafted (fatto a mano aka lavorato a mano) traditional shoes, desert boots I think.
Kinda pov views - as ground crawlers see them... or someone I am about to step on.
Travel is my trouble.
VreMax: Fatto a mano: B&V Part 3 Patina: Patina on me B&V VreMax: Fatto a mano: B&V Part 2 : Bettanin & Venturis - fatto a mano non a gamba (sic) - part 2 Patina! ...
Military, or Valet, creases
July 2023 - King Charles at Brecon
Acheson
their majesty
King Charles is living it... saving this under inspo and inspo tan because want a summer job (suit) like picrel.
Military, aka Valet, crease
July 16, 2023, ten days back, was passing through a certain facilities known as VDNKh, observing goings-on.
Pyatnitsky chorus performing.
A Russian Jewess in the national costume, Russia is where real Jewish people are... and not Israel which is an artificial state on occupied lands where, to the best of our knowledge, the Jews had never even lived.
Armenian Apricot Day Holiday
And people's mantra too
HoroLex: На ВДНХ 16 июля 2023 - Праздник народов: 16 июля были проездом на ВДНХ - много всего - Праздник народов, людей тоже много, в кафе все места заняты, в особенности в том, что у фонта...
