"Still Life with a Bridle and Aprocryphas"

I wish I'd read Zbigniew Herbert before visiting Amsterdam all those years ago.

• A powerful building, thicket and smooth - a sculpture of God without a face.
• An attack of alienation, but a gentle one that touches most people transported into a foreign place. .. a conviction that nothing happening around takes me into account...
• In a state of alienation the eye react quickly to objects and banal events that do not exist for the practical eye.
• A green vehicle .. stirs up clouds of dust by setting brushes in its chassis into a whirling motion, which might not be the ideal way of cleaning a city but is a serious warning that dust will never find peace here.
• Holland, the kingdom of things, great principality of objects. In Dutch, schoon means beautiful and at the same time clean, as if neatness was raised to the dignity of a virtue... The attachment to things was so great that pictures and portraits of objects were commissioned as if to confirm their existence and prolong their lives.
• why my feelings for Ruysdael cooled. It happened when spirit began to enter his canvases and everything became "soulful," every leaf , every broken branch, drop of water. Nature was sharing our own anxieties and sufferings, transitoriness and death. For me nature that lacks compassion is the most beautiful: a cold world in another world.
• a composition as simple as a chord.
• They can only be envied... their role in society and place on earth were not questioned, their profession universally recognized. The question why art exists did not occur to anyone... It is we who are poor, very poor. A major part of contemporary art declares itself on the side of chaos, gesticulates in a void, or tells the story of its own barren soul.  <> The old masters - all of them without exception - could repeat after Racine, "We work to please the public." Which means they believed in the purposefulness of their work and the possibility of interhuman communication. They affirmed visible reality with an inspired scrupulousness and childish seriousness, as if the order of the world and the revolution of the stars, the permanence of the firmament, depended on it.  <> Let such naivete be praised.
• In a letter to Germaine de Stael Benjamin Constant wrote, "This brave native lives with all that it possesses on a volcano, the lava of which is water."
• (A new variety of tulip:) A council took place at the gardener's, each person present expressing his opinion about the botanical revelation - exactly like high church councils preoccupied with the problems of real and imaginary miracles.
• The crazy turnover of the market became more and more abstract. What was sold was no longer the bulbs, but the names of bulbs.
• It should be honestly confessed: we have a strange liking for presenting follies in the sanctuaries of reason, and we also like to study catastrophes against a gentle landscape.
• (Gerard ter Borch as if were saying:) Yes I knew well the world of poverty and ugliness, but I painted the skin, the glittering surface, the appearance of things: the silky ladies, and gentlemen in irreproachable black. I admired how fiercely they fought for a life slightly longer than the one for which they were destined. They protected themselves with fashion, tailor's accessories, a fancy ruffle, ingenious cuffs, a fold, a pleat, any detail that would allow them to last a little longer before they - and we as well- are engulfed by the black background.
• The background was the most fascinating of all: black, deep as a precipice and at the same time flat as a mirror, palpable and disappearing in perspectives of infinity. A transparent cover over the abyss.
• "giving more scandal than satisfaction," that we find in Horace Walpole's book Painters in the Reign of Charles I.
• Paul Velery warned: "We should apologize that we dare to speak about painting." I was always aware of committing a tactless act.
• (On reading hermetic books:) Without attaining initiation, spurned by the Mystery of the chosen, I fell into the hell of the aesthetes. Truly beautiful are those constructions of liberated minds: vertiginous pyramids of spirit, monuments of air, mirrorlike labyrinths of allegory, precious animals and stones.
• (Siege of Leyden:) Leyden was not a port, it was situated inland. For aid- this rings almost magically, it was necessary to call on the element of water.  A careful plan to break the dikes and dams was worked out.
• The Spanish Army was unable to take advantage of its numerical superiority or tactical abilities. A land army that stands up to its knees in water fighting against a navy is a pure absurdity.
• For the Dutch, war was not a beautiful craft, an adventure of youth, or the crowning of a man's life. They undertook it without exaltation but also without protest, as one enters a struggle with an element. According to such a code of behavior, there was no room for displays of heroic bravery of spectacular death on the field of glory. On the contrary, what was most important was to save: to protect, to spare, and carry from the storm a sane head and one's belongings.
• The men of war in Holland did not form a separate social class surrounded by a nimbus of fame or enjoying special prestige.
• Freedom.. for the Dutch it was something as simple as breathing, looking and touching objects... This is why there is no division in their art between what is great and what is small.. They painted apples and the portraits of fabric shopkeepers, pewter plates and tulips, which such patience and such love that the images of other worlds and noisy tales about earthly triumphs fade in comparison.
• Perhaps the preacher wanted us to understand that the healthy republican spirit bestows equal hatred on giants and on caesars.
• Coen the ruthless agent of the Company of Indies: what did they talk about? About accounting, which was the hidden passion, even the love of the governor.
• (Cornelis Drebbel) made a smaller hammer to hit parasites on the head that was connected to tweezers which pulled the victim from the hair.
• we have a great fear before a revelation, and withhold of consent to a miracle.
• If I ('Vermeer') understand my task, it is to reconcile man with surrounding reality.
• O holy ritual of everydayness, without you time is empty like a falsified inventory that corresponds to no real objects.
• He had the experience that time was no longer docile. Before, during his youth, he was its master; he knew how to stop or accelerate it like a fisherman who imposes his own rhythm on the current of the river. Now he felt like a stone thrown to the bottom, a stone covered with moss over which a mobile immensity of incomprehensible waters was rolling.