The Mirror Was Often Used As A Symbol Of The Vanity Of Woman. The Moralizing, However, Was Mostly Hypocritical.

“The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical. You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure. The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight.”

— John Berger - Ways of Seeing

“We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work. We should be excited by that. But the reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem.” - AOC

u ever wish u could be a medieval monk and just illuminate a manuscript….like i feel like all of my worldly troubles would be solved if i could copy the aeneid by hand and then draw a knight fighting a snail in the margins

“I am often struck by the obvious fact that the other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found; I cannot open up the other, trace back the other’s origins, solve the riddle. Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know. “I can’t get to know you” means “I shall never know what you really think of me.” I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me. […] It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with. I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.”

— Roland Barthes, from A Lover’s Discourse, “The Unknowable”