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The Unphotographable #3: Alaskan Paradise with Rockwell Kent
Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see — who and what we are — to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called it “aesthetic consumerism” half a century before Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I offer The Unphotographable — every Saturday, a lovely image in words drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and transportive, depicting landscapes and experiences radiant with beauty and feeling beyond what a visual image could convey.

Life and Death and More Life: Leo Tolstoy on Science, Spirituality, and Our Search for Meaning
“A caterpillar sees itself shrivel up, but doesn’t see the butterfly which flies out of it.”

Nick Cave on Songwriting, the Mystery of the Unconscious, and the Sweet Severity of Truth
“Metaphor can create a merciful sense of distance from the cruel idea, or the unspeakable truth, and allow it to exist within us as a kind of poetic radiance, as a work of art.”

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