( photo by Andreas Franke )

“You walk through a series of arches, so to speak, and then, presently, at the end of a corridor, a door opens and you see backward through time, and you feel the flow of time, and realize you are only part of a great nameless procession.” - John Huston
Painting By Ernst Ferdinand Oehme

In that cathedral, in which you were alone, and where you entered to forget the world and yourself, you did it to feel the lack of motion and to forget waiting, to feel how you were solemnly born in the colonnades and in the arches, to feel how you were disseminated in the purple shrouding, the majestically curbed and undulating lines of the temple, whose vaults you measured, and in whose transcen...dental geometry you lost yourself. Your soul has become a column, an arch, and a vault. Above the world and in its forms your forms have been intertwined, and this non-movement of your nature has become a block of stone. And in your bending, without emotion, you have looked down on earth. What was your soul, if not the stone that does not rest on the ground? Down you were in your heights, weak in your toughness, heavy in your flight, stone on its way to heaven… But suddenly, the miracle of the sound of the organ, a miracle in the cathedral in which you thought you were alone. How the arches moved, the colonnades and vaults, and in vibration did your matter dilate itself, and the cathedral grew bigger in the world’s dimensions. In the sound of the organ, where you may still look for boundaries, what music comes from beyond the margins, from beyond the margins of the world and the soul?
- E. M. Cioran




Photo by Eduard Widmer