On Love and Memory

During her illness, my mother spoke to me about her own mother’s death. She remembered that her mother had not wanted to be cremated because she was afraid that the fire would burn her soul.

Someone very important to me said that Love is just something people say to start and end conversations. I took this to mean that, ultimately, the word has been rendered meaningless, bearing no relation to the curves, valleys, and sinkholes of our shared emotional landscapes.

Historiographically, the Renaissance has been conceived of as the rebirth of reason and liberation of thought, inviting a newly defined sense of subjectivity.

Around the turn of the 20th century, two remarkable artists were working in Vienna whose contributions would bring to surface deep cultural tensions that had somehow remained buried and unresolved in the Western consciousness for thousands of years.