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Image, Imagination And Language
Those who don’t read, at 70 years old will have lived only one life, their own! Who reads this will have lived 5000 years: It was when Cain killed Abel, when Renzo married Lucia, when Leopardi admired infinity… Because reading is immortality backwards.
— Umberto Eco
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“For a hundred years or more, every textbook of psychology and psychotherapy has advised that some method of talking about distressing feelings can resolve them. However, as we’ve seen, the experience of trauma itself gets in the way of being able to do that. No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
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I’ve spent most of my life in the territory of images but I’m probably more naturally attuned to language. My interest and feeling for images is due to an early decision and the education that followed, but I’m a born language lover. Now, in the middle of my mature years I play in both sandboxes, and as I do I ask how well or badly they can help me perceive Reality. These are my main tools to live by and they do expand my perspective greatly, they do bestow riches, but how close does one come to…
