All his life, the artist "noticed"—not just the rising and setting sun from his home near the ocean at Prouts Neck, Maine, but everything around him: people; scenery of his hunting and fishing trips; wildlife, which he painted with passion; objects and details others would never imagine the subject of art; and the effect, movement, and inner life of these.
Love and hate may produce different species modified by desire, joy and sadness, but here Malebranche tells us that all passions can be reduced to the three "primitive" passions of desire, joy and sadness, combined with different judgments about the passions' objects.
The unrequited lover, his passions awakened but unfulfilled, or the love object, ignorant of such exquisite suffering?
Here the parent of the opposite sex is conclusively abandoned in favour of a more suitable love object able to reciprocate reproductively useful passion.
Who knows, maybe the amount of passion is proportionate to the size of the feng shui love object?
The other night I saw a television program about Asperger's syndrome, a disorder characterized by, among other things, the inability to read human emotions and a compensatory passion for objects and rituals.
When a professional driven by his passion for objects as much as by the need to pay bills at the end of the month decides to turn a page after so many years and embarks on a large-scale weeding-out operation, this tells us that there is trouble afoot in the art collecting world and that dealers are revising their policy.
IF you were to say that Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who has made as much sense of the human mind as any writer has, has a passion for objects and subjects whose appeal is less than obvious, it would not really be an understatement.
Apparently, a German guy sharing her passion for objects answered for the wall.
To each new haunted house, she brings not only her outcast eye but also her child's hunger for grand passions, homely objects, happy endings and big ideas.
