Upstream Color Original Soundtrack Leaves Expanded May Be Prevailing Blue Mixed With Yellow Of The Sand I Used To Wonder At The Halo Of Light Around My Shadow And Would Fancy Myself One Of The Elect Fearing That They Would Be Light-headed For Want Of Food And Also Sleep Stirring Them Up As The Keeper Of A Menagerie His Wild Beasts The Finest Qualities Of Our Nature Like The Bloom On Fruits Can Be Preserved Perhaps The Wildest Sound That Is Ever Heard Here Making The Woods Ring Far And Wide I Love To Be Alone A Young Forest Growing Up Under Your Meadows Their Roots Reaching Quite Under The House The Rays Which Stream Through The Shutter Will Be No Longer Remembered When The Shutter Is Wholly Removed After Soaking Two Years And Then Lying High Six Months It Was Perfectly Sound Though Waterlogged Past Drying The Sun Is But A Morning Star A Low And Distant Sound Gradually Swelling And Increasing As If It Would Have A Universal And Memorable Ending A Sullen Rush And Roar Shane Carruth, Upstream Color www.discogs.com WaldenI love to be alone euphonynaturelonelinessmelancholysoundending
To know the place for the first time We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding The Dark Tower timecyclesendingexploration
She was wanting to break it off One summer morning, the beginning of July, I got this long letter from my girlfriend, and in it she’d written that she wanted to break up with me. I’ve always felt close to you, and I still like you even now, and I’m sure that from here on I’ll continue to…et cetera, et cetera. In short, she was wanting to break it off. She had found herself a new boyfriend. I hung my head and smoked six cigarettes, went outside and drank a can of beer, came back in and smoked another cigarette. Then I took three HB pencils I had on my desk and snapped them in half. It wasn’t that I was angry, really. I just didn’t know what to do. In the end, I merely changed clothes and headed off to work. And for a while there, everyone within shouting distance was commenting on my suddenly “outgoing disposition”. What is it about life? Haruki Murakami, The Last Lawn of the Afternoon ending
Until we leave the gate behind And yet the timeless way is not complete, and will not fully generate the quality without a name, until we leave the gate behind. Indeed this ageless character has nothing, in the end, to do with languages. The language, and the processes which stem from it, merely release the fundamental order which is native to us. They do not teach us, they only remind us of what we know already, and of what we shall discover time and time again, when we give up our ideas and opinions, and do exactly what emerges from ourselves. At this final stage, the patterns are no longer important: the patterns have taught you to be receptive to what is real. It is the gate which leads you to the state of mind, in which you live so close to your own heart that you no longer need a language. This is the final lesson of the timeless way. Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building The natural thing to do zenending
A circle of beads If you count off a circle of beads, you never reach an end. At what point, and with what feelings, would his fingers cease to move those beads? This may be a silly question, but it haunts me. Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro ending
Now get inside You say the ocean's rising like I give a shit You say the whole world's ending, honey, it already did You're not gonna slow it, Heaven knows you tried Got it? Good, now get inside Bo Burnham, Bo Burnham: Inside genius.com ending
When life is over At the end, which is when life is over, death removes all the clothing that differentiated them, and all are equal in the grave. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote deathstatusending
That funny feeling That unapparent summer air in early fall The quiet comprehending of the ending of it all There it is again That funny feeling Bo Burnham, Bo Burnham: Inside genius.com ending
You can get anywhere from anywhere And if you can get anywhere from anywhere, You can start anywhere And end anywhere. There is no single necessary order. Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing progressending
Ending is better than mending “We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better…” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World noveltyrepairtrashwastemelancholyending
Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die A Book by Sushila Blackman Japanese Death PoemsHe only who has lived with the beautiful exitsdeathending
How do you know when your paintings are finished? A Quote by Gerhard Richter matthiasott.com When nothing disturbs me and I have no idea what to do more, what I could add or destroy. This is very surprising, often, when I’m painting, again and again, every day and it feels like it is never-ending […] and it will never become a good painting. And suddenly, it’s finished. Oh! Good. Thanks. Painting With the Web perfectionprogressending
Exit pages An Idea by Brad Enslen ramblinggit.com Today I made an Exit page. So many people end their visit by hitting the Back button on their browser. The exit page is a last attempt to get them to explore the Blog Directory to find an entertaining blog. Or failing that to try a search on a search engine they may have never tried before. exitswwwfunwhimsyending
What Good Means An Article by Dan Klyn medium.com The center of the waySeductionWhat the material wants to beAsking yourself some questionsLosing meaning+1 More
The center of the way The advice I’ve received from those who are close to the center of this timeless way of building is to start small. Like with a piece of tile, or a tea tray. And to then imagine along with Christopher Alexander: What it would be like to live in a mental world where one’s reasons for making something functionally and one’s reasons for making something a certain shape, or in a certain ornamental way are coming from precisely the same place in you . functionmaking
Seduction “The classic pervasive seduction to designers is finding a solution instead of the truth.” — Richard Saul Wurman
What the material wants to be Part of how Lou Kahn made things be good was to ask the material what it wanted to do and be. He asked brick what it liked, and would get a different answer depending on the context for the building. In Dacca, the capital of Bangladesh, brick said it liked an arch. For the Korman House in Philadelphia, brick said it liked two giant fireplaces with a lintel between them for a doorway beneath and a balcony above. The material finds the right objectWe are working against the grain of the woodThe joy of the humble brick material
Asking yourself some questions All of the moves that we make in space will tend toward being in accord with this phenomenon of wholeness / beauty / life if we’re willing to bring the requisite level of care to the doing of our work. Alexander says that each of us possess the means for accessing this order within ourselves and — here’s where he loses most other architects and many in the so-called sciences in academia — he contends that what we’re connecting with inside of ourselves is an objective criterion for what good means. Applying the criterion is easy: you ask yourself some questions: With any action you might take with regard to placement, and with regard to the situatedness of things in space you ask yourself: does this move increase wholeness / beauty / life? Does the intervention you’re taking intensify the feelings of wholeness in you as the maker when you are performing the work? How does your work on this one part enhance what’s going on among wholes at the system level? goodnessmaking
Losing meaning The people who’ve proven that they can make very good individual products with the radical focus of a spotlight seem to be pushed ever further from making good ecosystems. Products are being made “consistent” with the application of so-called “design patterns,” and rather than bringing coherence to these various touch-points, the painting-on of interface standards and interaction patterns did something far less valuable. Rote consistency, in the way many seem to be going about it (Material Design being just one example), is at odds with making things be good. It simplifies what needs to remain complex. Always, when simplification is underway, meaning is being lost. complexitysoftware
Two coffee trays Show image 0 Show image 1 We speculate that the shop owners designed and built an initial quantity of these remarkable coffee trays, replete with what Alexander considers to be the fifteen geometric properties that correlate with wholeness / beauty / life. Then they got busy. And then they got successful. They needed more coffee trays, and our hypothesis is that somebody decided to simplify the trays to ensure they could be produced in the quantities and at the price that worked for their budget, within an urgent food-service timeline. The simplified tray fulfills every function the more complex tray does, with less fuss in manufacturing on account of having standardized its geometry. The simplified tray works, but isn’t alive. It lacks the gradients, local symmetries, levels of scale, contrast, and boundaries that are all present and accounted for in the tray that’s got wholeness / beauty / life. The tray with wholeness isn’t necessarily better than the simpler one. But it is good.