“The nature of our epoch,” he [Hofmannsthal] wrote in 1905, “is multiplicity and indeterminacy. It can rest only on das Gleitende [the slipping, the sliding].” He added that “what other generations believed to be firm is in fact das Gleitende.” Could there be a better description about the way the Newtonian world was slipping after Maxwell's and Planck's discoveries? “Everything fell into parts,” Hofmannsthal wrote, “the parts again into more parts, and nothing allowed itself to be embraced by concepts any more.”

Paris in 1900 was teeming with talent on every side. There were seventy daily newspapers, 350,000 electric streetlamps and the first Michelin guide had just appeared. It was the home of Alfred Jarry, […] of Marie Curie, working on radioactivity, of Stephane Mallarmé, symbolist poet, and of Claude Debussy and his “impressionist music.” It was the home of Erik Satie and his “atonally adventurous” piano pieces. James Whistler and Oscar Wilde were exiles in residence, though the latter died that year. It was the city of Emile Zola and the Dreyfuss affair, of Auguste and Louis Lumière who, having given the world's first commercial showing of movies in Lyons in 1895, had brought their new craze to the capital. At the Moulin Rouge, Henri de Toulouse-Latrec was a fixture; Sarah Bernhardt was a fixture too, in the theatre named after her, where she played the lead role in Hamlet en travesti. It was the city of Gertrude Stein, Maurice Maeterlinck, Guillaume Apollinaire, of Isadora Duncan and Henri Bergson. In his study of the period, the Harvard historian Roger Shattuck called those the “Banquet Years,” because Paris was celebrating, with glorious enthusiasm, the pleasures of life.

Socrates: I perceive, Ion; and I will proceed to explain to you what I imagine to be the reason of this. The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer is not an art, but, as I was just saying, an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet, but which is commonly known as the stone of Heraclea. This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings; and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another so as to form quite a long chain: and all of them derive their power of suspension from the original stone. In like manner the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration. For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed.

A point is that which has no part.

A line is breadthless length.

A circle is a plane figure contained by one line such that all the straight lines falling upon it from one point among those lying in the figure are equal to one another.

The all glass faзade of the extension of the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, situated in an urban park, acts—under certain light conditions—as a true mirror. Numerous birds, mostly trushes, pigeons and woodcocks, die in collision with the building. Especially during the first months after the new wing was erected in 1995, a 'bang' or a sharp 'tick' on the window meant work for the bird department. Such was the case on 5 June 1995 at 17.55 h. An unusual loud bang, one floor below my office, indicated yet another collision and an addition to the bird collection. I went downstairs immediately to see if the window was damaged, and saw a drake mallard (Anas platyrhynchos LINNAEUS, 1758) lying motionless on its belly in the sand, two metres outside the faзade. The unfortunate duck apparently had hit the building in full flight at a height of about three metres from the ground. Next to the obviously dead duck, another male mallard (in full adult plumage without any visible traces of moult) was present. He forcibly picked into the back, the base of the bill and mostly into the back of the head of the dead mallard for about two minutes, then mounted the corpse and started to copulate, with great force, almost continuously picking the side of the head. Rather startled, I watched this scene from close quarters behind the window until 19.10 h during which time (75 minutes!) I made some photographs and the mallard almost continuously copulated his dead congener. He dismounted only twice, stayed near the dead duck and picked the neck and the side of the head before mounting again. The first break (at 18.29 h) lasted three minutes and the second break (at 18.45 h) lasted less than a minute. At 19.12 h, I disturbed this cruel scene.

Naked woman rises either from the sea or from bed; she is called Venus or Nini. Nothing better will ever be created.

Лазаревское - бронирование гостиниц, отелей, санаториев, пансионатов в Лазаревском. Комплекс «Прометей Клуб», Санаторий «Одиссея», Гостиница «Империя», Санаторий «Бирюза», Гостиница «Океаник», Гостиница «Шторм», Гостиница «Волна», Отель «Пятница-Диаманд»

Plato defined man thus: “Man is a two-legged animal without feathers;” and was much praised for the definition; so Diogenes plucked a cock and brought it into his school, and said, “This is Plato's man.” On which account this addition was made to the definition, “With broad flat nails.”

He [Solon] used to say, too, […] that laws were like cobwebs—for that if any trifling or powerless thing fell into them, they held it fast; but if a thing of any size fell into them, it broke the meshes and escaped.

Ethics is the aesthetics of behavior.

In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease.

For a moment he was so confused that he actually thought he had never in all his life seen anything so beautiful as this girl—although he only caught her from behind in silhouette against the candlelight. He meant, of course, he had never smelled anything so beautiful. But since he knew the smell of humans, knew it a thousandfold, men, women, children, he could not conceive of how such an exquisite scent could be emitted by a human being. Normally human odor was nothing special, or it was ghastly. Children smelled insipid, men urinous, all sour sweat and cheese, women smelled of rancid fat and rotting fish. Totally uninteresting, repulsive—that was how humans smelled…And so it happened that for the first time in his life, Grenouille did not trust his nose and had to call on his eyes for asistance if he was to believe what he smelled. This confusion of senses did not last long at all. Actually he required only a moment to convince himself optically—then to abandon himself all the more ruthlessly to olfactory perception. And now he smelled that this was a human being, smelled the sweat of her ampits, the oil in her hair, the fishy odor of her genitals, and smelled it all with the greatest pleasure. Her sweat smelled as fresh as the sea breeze, the tallow of her hair as sweet as nut oil, her genitals were as fragrant as the bouquet of water lilies, her skin as apricot blossoms…and the harmony of all these components yielded a perfume so rich, so balanced, so magical, that every perfume that Grenouille had smelled until now, every edifice of odors that he had so playfully created within himself, seemed at once to be utterly meaningless. A hundred thousand odors seemed worthless in the presence of this scent. This one scent was the higher principle, the pattern by which the others must be ordered. It was pure beauty.

The ten thousand men and women, children and patriarchs assembled there felt no different—they grew weak as young maidens who have succumbed to the charms of a lover. They were overcome by a powerful sense of goodwill, of tenderness, of crazy, childish infatuation, yes, God help them, of love for this little homicidal man, and they were unable, unwilling to do anything about it. It was like a fit of weeping you cannot fight down, like tears that have been held back too long and rise up from deep within you, dissolving whatever resists them, liquefying it, and flushing it away. These people were now pure liquid, their spirits and minds were melted; nothing was left but an amorphous liquid, and all they could feel was their hearts floating and sloshing about within them, and they laid those hearts, each man, each woman, in the hands of the little man in the blue frock coat, for better or for worse. They loved him.

The result was that the scheduled execution of one of the most abominable criminals of the age degenerated into the largest orgy the world had seen since the second century before Christ. Respectable women ripped open their blouses, bared their breasts, cried out hysterically, threw themselves on the ground with skirts hitched high. The men's gazes stumbled madly over this landscape of straddling flesh; with quivering fingers they tugged to pull from their trousers their members frozen stiff by some invisible frost; they fell down anywhere with a groan and copulated in the most impossible positions and combinations: grandfather with virgin, odd-jobber with lawyer's spouse, apprentice with nun, Jesuit with Freemason's wife—all topsy-turvy, just as opportunity presented. The air was heavy with the sweet odor of sweating lust and filled with loud cries, grunts and moans from ten thousand human beasts. It was infernal.

With that, everything within him went white before his eyes, while the world outside turned raven black. The trapped fog condensed to a raging liquid, like frothy, boiling milk. It inundated him, pressed its unbearable weight against the inner shell of his body, could find no way out. He wanted to flee, for God's sake, to flee, but where… He wanted to burst, to explode, to keep from suffocating on himself. Finally he sank down and lost consciousness.

They had formed a circle around him, twenty, thirty people, and their circle grew smaller and smaller. Soon the circle could not contain them all, they began to push, to shove, and to elbow, each of them trying to be closest to the center.

And then all at once the last inhibition collapsed within them, and the circle collapsed with it. They lunged at the angel, pounced on him, threw him to the ground. Each of them wanted to touch him, wanted to have a piece of him, a feather, a bit of plumage, a spark from that wonderful fire. They tore away his clothes, his hair, his skin from his body, they plucked him, they drove their claws and teeth into his flesh, they attacked him like hyenas.

But the human body is tough and not easily dismembered, even horses have great difficulty accomplishing it. And so the flash of knives soon followed, thrusting and slicing, and then the swish of axes and cleavers aimed at the joints, hacking and crushing the bones. In very short order, the angel was divided into thirty pieces, and every animal in the pack snatched a piece for itself, and then, driven by voluptuous lust, dropped back to devour it.

Rimgia, whose hair was the color of the central length inside a split carrot…

Be still. I am going to drain you now to the very threshold of death, and I want you to be quiet, so quiet that you can almost hear the flow of blood through your veins, so quiet that you can hear the flow of that same blood through mine.