“There is no such thing as was— only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.”

William Faulkner, Paris Review interview (Spring 1956)

“Now, if the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would amount to the same.”

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“A Recording Session With a Composer: Igor Stravinsky,” a Columbia Records promotional film in which Stravinsky is seen conducting a 1955 studio performance of his L’histoire du soldat:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

“Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering. Time lost is time not filled, time left empty.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Dock Boggs sings and plays “Country Blues” at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.”

James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest

From 2008:

Louis Armstrong was not only a great artist but one of the brightest stars in the sky of America’s popular culture. One of the signs of his admittance to that pantheon was the frequency with which Al Hirschfeld drew him. For most of his long lifetime, Hirschfeld was America’s best-known and most successful caricaturist. To be drawn by him was like being the mystery guest on What’s My Line? It meant that you’d really, truly arrived….

Read the whole thing here.