MIA

"This feeling is that of an absence: I would say that it is the feeling of atheism, not as a positive affirmation of a world consisting of nothing but itself -- precisely because here, in this "here" of the landscape, it does not consist of itself but of its opening -- but rather as an affirmation that the divine, if it presents itself in some way, certainly does not present itself as a presence or as a representation, nor as an absence hidden behind or within the depths of nature (another form of presence), but as the withdrawal of the divine itself." Jean-Luc Nancy Uncanny Landscape (in the Ground of the Image, 2005).

"I don't believe in God, but I do miss him." Julian Barnes, Nothing to be Frightened of (2008).

Venice, The Lido, December 1992, J Bowring

"I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by a tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life."
Marcel Proust, The Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

"And these things that live,slipping away, understand that you praise them;transitory themselves, they trust us for rescue,us, the most transient of all. They wish us to transmute them in our invisible heart--oh, infinitely into us! Whoever we are."
Rainer Maria Rilke (C. F. MacIntyre, translation) "The Ninth Elegy" Duino Elegies (1911-1922)

"They are not outside us, nor even entirely within, but flow back and foth between us and the objects we have made, the landscape we have shaped and move in .
We have dreamed all these things in our deepest lives and they are ourselves. It is our self that we are making out there, and when the landscape is complete we shall have become the gods who are intended to fill it."

David Malouf, An Imaginary Life (1978)