But the landscapes we dream are just shades of the landscapes we've seen, and the tedium of dreaming them is almost as great as the tedium of looking at the world.

Fernando Pessoa

Neal Jones

Neal Jones 

bought from an artist
selling her work
in a charity shop

Theophile Gautier - 1843 wrote to his friend Nerval in Ciaro

"People are not always of the country in which they where born and, when you are prey to such a condition, you search everywhere for your true country. Those who are made this way feel exiled in their own town, strangers in their homes; they are tormented by bouts of inverted homesickness. Its is a strange malady: its victims feel like caged birds of passage. When the time comes to leave, you are troubled by great desires and the sight of clouds moving off towards the sun is strangely disquieting."

I see dreamed landscapes as plainly as real ones
If I lean out over my dreams
I'm leaning out over something
If I see life go by, my dream is of something

Fernando Pessoa

I dream of landscapes
I never visit them

Fernando Pessoa

I'm liberated and lost.
I feel. I shiver with fever.
I'm I.

Fernando Pessoa

watercolours 

Few are made for independence - it is a privilege of the strong. And he who attempts it, having the completest right to it but without being compelled to, thereby proves that he is probably not only strong but also daring to the point of recklessness. He ventures into a labyrinth, he multiplies by a thousand the dangers which life as such already brings with it, not the smallest of which is that no one can behold how and where he goes astray, is cut off from others, and is torn to pieces limb from limb by some cave minotaur of conscience. If such one is destroyed, it takes place so far from the understanding of men that they neither feel it nor sympathize - and he can no longer go back! He can no longer go back even to pity of men!

Friedrich Nietzsche

Leon Spilliaert

more August Sander

August Sander

A terrible weariness fills the soul of my heart. I feel sad for whom I never was, and I don't know with what kind of nostalgia I miss him. I fell, with every sunset, against my hopes and certainties.

Fernando Pessoa

Solitary people: Some people are so used to solitude with themselves that they never compare themselves to others, but spin forth their monologue of a life in a calm joyous mood, holding good conversations with themselves, even laughing.

Thus one must grant certain men their solitude and not be silly enough, as often happens, to pity them for it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Little Boy found

The little boy lost in the lonely fen,
Led by the wand'ring light,
Began to cry; but God, ever nigh,
Appear'd like his father, in white.

He kissed the child, and by the hand led,
And to his mother brought,
Who in sorrow pale, thro' the lonely dale,
Her little boy weeping sought.

William Blake

The Little Boy Lost

"Father! father! where are you going?
O do not walk so fast.
Speak, father, speak to your little boy,
Or I shall be lost"

The night was dark, no father was there;
The child was wet with dew;
The mire was deep, and the child did weep,
And away the vapour flew.

William Blake

Wandering - Hermann Hesse

On May 2nd, 1919, Herman Hesse wrote: I have had to bear a very heavy burden in my personal life in recent years. Now I am about to go to Ticino once again, to live for a while as a hermit in nature and in my world.'

In 1920, after settling in the Ticino village of Montagnola, Hesse published Wandering. It is a love letter to a magic-garden world, which can be read as a meditation on Hesse's attempt to begin a new life.

Wandering has a particular relevance to the desire of our own times to return to nature. Illustrated with Hesse's own sensitive sketches, this serene book gives the joy of his pure prose, his lyricism and his love for the earth.

Captain Cooks ship

the boy who wouldn't grow up

Bucklers Hard

The Smid Family Collection
Balk
The Netherlands 1838-45