free clock, slave clock

From The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon

17. Things That Arouse a Fond Memory of the Past

Dried hollyhock. The objects used during the Display of Dolls. To find a piece of deep violet or grape-coloured material that has been pressed between the pages of a notebook.

It is a rainy day and one is feeling bored. To pass the time, one starts looking through some old papers. And then one comes across the letters of a man one used to love.

Last year's paper fan. A night with a clear moon.

Josef Albers in VES, 2011

Doing Josef Albers color studies in one of my painting classes was one of the happiest times of my life, and one of the saddest to remember.
Some of the assignments: make one color look like two different colors by placing it on different backgrounds. Make two different colors look like the same color. Make two different colors seem transparent where they overlap. For all these tasks, we had thousands of different sheets of colored paper to choose from.

The Next Village

The Next Village
Franz Kafka

My grandfather used to say: "Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that--not to mention accidents--even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey."

Train ride, Marrakech to Fez

On the train ride from Marrakech to Fez you can still see farmers and their families gathering hay by hand and loading it onto donkeys. After a year of farming, I was very moved by the sight. It reminded me of something Claudio of Podere Campriano told me. I asked: "But in the olden days, before machines, how did they even have time to do all this?" He said: "In the olden days, the only thing they had was time."