Spatial relationship

"Eight Bells"

“Eight Bells” features two mariners, nearly identical in appearance and outfit.    The pair depict two types of looking, one peering out in the distance, the other focused on something close at hand. In their spatial relationship, the two individuals can be construed as a striking metaphor of the scientific counterpoint duality of exploring on one hand the immense vastness of the cosmos and on the other the deep intrinsic probing of microscopic nature. Painted in 1886 this is one of Homer’s most celebrated paintings.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was an American landscape painter and printmaker

Pictured at 44 a quiet, strong-willed, terse, sociable nature; and dry sense of humor. Harper's sent Homer to the front lines of the American Civil War (1861–1865), where he sketched battle scenes and camp life, the quiet moments as well as the chaotic ones. He was very private about his personal life and his methods. Perhaps Homer's austere individualism is aptly captured in this curious admonition to artists and painters.

"Look at nature, work independently, and solve your own problems. Leave rocks for your old age—they're easy"

The Family Idiot ... on estrangement

B: Many of your friendships have ended in estrangement … why are things like that?

S: Breaking off doesn’t affect me in the least. A thing is dead – that’s all.

B: Can you tell me why it doesn’t affect you?

S: I think I did not feel a deep friendship for some of the men who were among the closer of my friends.

B: But what do you mean when you say, “I didn’t feel a deep friendship”? Who have you had a deep friendship with?

S: With some women … but generally speaking, there weren’t deep sensitive elements between the other fellows and myself.

B: Do you mean that what existed was rather a certain intellectual understanding, and that this understanding came to an end either for political reasons or for others, then everything fell to pieces?

S: Yes, that’s right.

B: The emotional bond that makes one overlook certain divergences did not remain …

S: Exactly….

B: And on the whole you always prefer the present.

S: The present is concrete and real. Yesterday is not so sharp and clear, and I’m not yet thinking of tomorrow. For me there is a preference for the present over the past. There are people who like the past better because they attribute an aesthetic or cultural value to it. I don’t. In moving into the past the present dies. It loses its value of dawning life. It still belongs to life. I can refer back to it; but it no longer possesses that quality that is given to every moment insofar as I am living it and which it loses when I am living it no more.

B: No doubt that’s why you have never found it very hard to break with your friends

S: Yes. I began a new life without them.

B: Is that because as soon as a thing belongs to the past it is really abolished for you?

S: Yes. And as for the friends who are still left to me, still living, they have to have a fresh present immediacy so as not to be continually harking back to the same one. I mustn’t see them as they were yesterday or the day before, with the same worries, the same ideas, the same ways of speaking. There has to be a change.

... Jean-Paul Sartre (S) (1905-80) in conversation with Simone de Beauvoir (B) (1908-86) in late life.