more or less anonymous walls, windows and doors, even if windows and doors are said to be no good in winter

ogives of Horezu monastery, built around 1690







old house on my street, surrounded by tall grass whose name I don't know, 2008







Bran Castle (now said to be Dracula's), built between 1377 and 1395






defence wall of the fortress-church in Prejmer, near Brasov, first mentioned in 1240







doors to the monks' chambers, fortress-church in Prejmer, near Brasov, first mentioned in 1240






walls of a communist building, left unattended after 1989 and conquered by the mountain meadow






wall of Horezu monastery, built around 1690, in front of which a nun hesitates in the rain, 2007

away for a while...

In the mountains, there you feel free.

T. S. Eliot

on the blue wall

on top of the mountain,
I stand still
under the ageless tree
in the cold morning
half-awake
I wave and smile
into the floating
in-between

Be quiet, Fiers

LOPAKHIN. Please attend carefully! Your estate is only
thirteen miles from the town, the railway runs by, and if the
cherry orchard and the land by the river are broken up into
building lots and are then leased off for villas you'll get at
least twenty-five thousand roubles a year profit out of it.

GAEV. How utterly absurd!

LUBOV. I don't understand you at all, Ermolai Alexeyevitch.

LOPAKHIN. You will get twenty-five roubles a year for each
dessiatin from the leaseholders at the very least, and if you
advertise now I'm willing to bet that you won't have a vacant plot
left by the autumn; they'll all go. In a word, you're saved. I
congratulate you. Only, of course, you'll have to put things
straight, and clean up. ... For instance, you'll have to pull down
all the old buildings, this house, which isn't any use to anybody
now, and cut down the old cherry orchard. ...

LUBOV. Cut it down? My dear man, you must excuse me, but you don't
understand anything at all. If there's anything interesting or
remarkable in the whole province, it's this cherry orchard of ours.

LOPAKHIN. The only remarkable thing about the orchard is that it's
very large. It only bears fruit every other year, and even then you
don't know what to do with them; nobody buys any.

GAEV. This orchard is mentioned in the "Encyclopaedic Dictionary."

LOPAKHIN. [Looks at his watch] If we can't think of anything and
don't make up our minds to anything, then on August 22, both the
cherry orchard and the whole estate will be up for auction. Make up
your mind! I swear there's no other way out, I'll swear it again.

FIERS. In the old days, forty or fifty years back, they dried the
cherries, soaked them and pickled them, and made jam of them, and
it used to happen that ...

GAEV. Be quiet, Fiers.

FIERS. And then we'd send the dried cherries off in carts to Moscow
and Kharkov. And money! And the dried cherries were soft, juicy,
sweet, and nicely scented. ... They knew the way. ...

LUBOV. What was the way?

FIERS. They've forgotten. Nobody remembers.


Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

We shall not even know

We shall not even know that we have met.
Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again,
Where dead men meet, on lips of living men.

Samuel Butler, Mellonta tauta

flowers and the Tree of Life 1

Simplitatea nu este un ţel în artă, dar ajungi fără voie la ea pe măsură ce te apropii de sensul real al lucrurilor.
Constantin Brancusi

Simplicity is not an aim in art, but one reaches it unwillingly, as one approaches the real meaning of things.

flowers and the Tree of Life 2

flowers and the Tree of Life 3