Simply To See...

 John Gray, “Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals”:

 “SIMPLY TO SEE: Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?”

 

illustration for "House And Garden" magazine, 1925 by  André Édouard Marty (1882 - 1974)

 

Sophia Loren@88

#SophiaLoren88

गिब्सन गर्ल आणि दीनानाथ सुंदरी...Charles Dana Gibson and Dinanath Dalal

Gibson Girl represents the fashion image for American women between the years 1890 and 1910 approximately. Her name is due to illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, whose cartoons in magazines and other publications of the time showed a stylized and aristocratic type of girl who became the aesthetic pattern to follow.

The Gibson Girls represented an elegant, sophisticated, well-mannered woman with a certain ′′ independence ". Her image should be slender, but with voluptuous shapes accentuated by the corset (hourglass figure), and they used their long hair collected in the bulky hairstyles. They are considered the first ideal of American female beauty.

 

ह्याच धर्तीवर मी "दीनानाथ सुंदरी" तयार केली.  

जेंव्हा मन रेंगाळते आणि शरीर धाव घेते.... Marion Fayolle’s Wordless Narratives

 

Artist: Marion Fayolle

Life of Doctors Before Stethoscope!

 

Yvette Guilbert 1865-1944

George Bernard Shaw:

"....And I was not at all deceived in my expectancy. It amuses her to tell interviewers that she cannot sing, and has no gestures ; but I need not say that there would be very little fun for her in that if she were not one of the best singers and pantomimists in Europe. She divided her programme into three parts : Ironic songs, Dramatic songs, and but perhaps I had better use the French heading here, and say ' Chansons Legeres.' For though Mile. Guilbert sings the hymns of a very ancient faith, profusely....

.....Technically Mile. Guilbert is a highly accomplished artist. She makes all her effects in the simplest way and with perfect judgment. Like the ancient Greeks, not to mention the modern music-hall artists, she relies on the middle and low registers of her voice, they being the best suited for perfectly well-controlled declamation ; but her cantabile is charming, thanks to a fine ear and a delicate rhythmic faculty. Her command of every form of expression is very remarkable, her tones ranging from the purest and sweetest pathos to the cockniest Parisian cynicism. There is not a trace of the rowdy restlessness and forced go of the English music-hall singer about her ;....."

('Yvette Guilbert: Struggles and Victories', 1910)

Artist: Leonetto Cappiello (1875- 1942), 1899

Cogito, Ergo Sum: What About Helena Jans, René Descartes' Maid

A A. C. Grayling, ‘Descartes: The Life and Times of a Genius ‘,2006:

“.....Descartes was without question a man of scientific bent. On Sunday 15 October 1634 he wrote in the flyleaf of a book that on that day he had conceived a child with the serving maid Helena Jans in the room he rented in the house of an Englishman called Thomas Sargent in Amsterdam's Westerkirkstraat. The confidence of this announcement—it proved true-—is striking. Baillet was in a dilemma, having thus to report his hero's commission of the sin of fornication with a maidservant, and not just that but the subsequent production of a bastard child; so he ascribed the aberration— as he thus implied it to be—to Descartes' scientific interest in anatomy.

In the register of baptisms in the Reformed Church at Deventer (no Catholic church being available), on 7 August 1635, the arrival was recorded of Francine, daughter to Helena Jans and "Rener Jochems" (Rener son of Jochems). There is no evidence, documentary or circumstantial, that Descartes married Helena Jans, but later enemies who were Catholics accused him of apostasy because he had married a Calvinist in a Protestant church, the claim doubtless being a fabrication from the fact that he had his child baptised in such a church.

And as it happens, Francine was not an illegitimate child despite the fact that Descartes did not marry her mother, for the law of the United Provinces stated that it was enough for children to be legitimate that their fathers acknowledged them....

..... Glimpses of Descartes as a family man are few but tantalising, and in respect of Helena Jans a little ambiguous. In a letter written in August 1637 he set out arrangements for Helena and Francine to join him in new lodgings. His hostess was, he wrote, perfectly happy to have the little girl (Descartes referred to her as "my niece") to come and live with him, "and that we would easily agree on the price because it was indifferent to her whether she had one child more or less to take care of" As Descartes' hostess was in need of a servant he also suggested that Helena hasten to leave her present employment "before St. Victor's Day," this being the traditional date for hiring and firing servants, and to come to work where he was lodging.

What this suggests is that Descartes and Helena did not live as a couple, although they liked to be together if they could, and that he was fond of his little daughter and wished to have her with him. If Helena worked as a maid in the house where Descartes and his "niece" lived, Helena could be near her daughter and she and Descartes could continue to engage, pace Clerselier's pieties, in anatomical experiments, without marrying or openly living in sin....”

 

“’Cogito, ergo sum’ is all very well for you, but what about me?”  

 
Artist: James Stevenson, The New Yorker, March 2017

पिवळीच मी पाकोळी की...Thistle in a Field

 हे अतिशय सुंदर, १८७५ सालचे, वाळवंटातील झुडूप आणि त्यावरील फुल बघून मला " रंग रंगुल्या सान सानुल्या गवत फुला रे गवत फुला" आठवत नाही....

ना आठवते "वन सर्व सुगंधित झाले/ मन माझे मोहुन गेले - कितीतरी"...

तर आठवते दुर्गाबाईंचे "पिवळीच मी पाकोळी की" (निसर्गोत्सव, 1996)......

 Thistle in a Field, 1875., कलाकार: Fidelia Bridges (1834-1923)