Be still

Today I rid my office of the last of the magazines that had been stacked for years in the storeroom and, as I've done before, leafed through for images I might use on the blog. Ranging from the 70s to the 90s these old Architectural Digests are really a treasure house of imagery but quickly I realized I was applying personal rather than empirical standards and had winnowed a lot of what I disliked and pulled only that which represented my own taste, then and now. Not what a historian, manqué or not, should be doing I told myself but continued nonetheless for, after all, history in this sense is about me and my taste. 

Right now I am suffering from a bad case of visual indigestion and feel that if I see another frill, another Chinese lacquer 12-panel screen, piece of chintz, conversation pit, plump sofa, soccer ball-shaped pillow, 1920s steel and leather, another whatever, I am going to lose it. Tonight, I have had it with decorating and the 30 years of inferior desecration that has gone on in the name of designerish creativity - infestations of velvets, chintzes, gilded whatnots - OK, one list of betes noires is enough. But do you realize how long ago that darn karate chop to pillows started? Pillows are still being karate chopped in showrooms all over this land. Still!

Thus, I post in the name of sanity (mine) a picture of a Henry Moore sculpture - a seated, contemplative figure apparently just watching the early winter morning mist swirl and steam. Peace and quiet, solitude, the cries of the rooks - what more could you want?