Thursday, October 11, 2007

travel, landscape, nirvana: three quotes on city


And I travel in order to know my geography
A madman in Marcel Reja,
L ‘Art Chez les fous(Paris 1907), p.131, cited by Walter Benjamin in Arcades Project, p.416.
Landscape that is in fact, is what Paris becomes for the flaneur. Or more precisely: the city splits for him into its dialectical poles. It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes him as a room.
Walter Benjamin
Nirvana: a glorious city, stainless and undefined, pure and white, unaging, deathless, secure and calm and happy
Milind Panho,
v, 6, cited by Basham A.L., The Wonder that was India, p.274,1992

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