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...Grinding the skin off earth
Earth bleeds her raw true darkness

A land naked now as a wound
That sun swabs and dabs...

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​Ted Hughes, Remains of Elmet, 1979
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mutation of weathers and seasons,

a windfall composing the floor it rots into.



Seamus Heaney, North, 1975

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my silence 
is like glass blown by an apprentice
flawed and cracked

but now I have learned to form silence
and next time I will do it right
perfectly


Webb Chiles, Artist of words and wind, 1975


Picture
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The quality it had now, in fresh untempered sunlight, was neither faerie nor austere; the changing shadows of dusk and midnight had vanished with the darkness and the rain, and walls and roof and towers were bathed in the radiance that comes only in the first hours of the day, soft, new-washed, the delicate aftermath of dawn. The people who slept within must surely bear some imprint of this radiance in themselves, must turn instinctively to the light seeping through the shutters, while the ghostly dreams and sorrows of the night slipped away, finding sanctuary in the unwakened forest trees the sun had not yet touched. 


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Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat, 1957



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...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. - Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658


On Exactitude in Science, Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley. 1946


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So it is with time, that lightens what is dark, that darkens what is light.


​Samuel Beckett, Watt, 1953


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​Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.



Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, 1759

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The Atlantic has bitten into the island's neck like a stoat,

and will in time consume it all.  

Aran is a dying moment.



Tim Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, 1986

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A brown musically moving beauty, the earth’s fullness
Slides towards the sea. An escape
Of earth-serpent, with all its hoards, casting the land, like an old skin,
Pulling its body from under the eye.


Ted Hughes, River, 1983