Artificial light

I blink in uncertainty at this dreamlike luminescence, feeling as though some misty film were blunting my vision. The light from the pale white paper, powerless to dispel the darkness of the alcove, is instead repelled by the darkness, creating a world of confusion where dark and light are indistinguishable. Have you not yourselves sensed a difference in the light that suffuses such a room, a rare tranquility not found in ordinary light? Have you never felt a sort of fear in the face of the ageless, a fear that in that room you might lose all consciousness of the passage of time, that untold years might pass and upon emerging you should find you had grown old and gray?

--Junichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, 1933 (Vintage, 2001), p.34.

Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world?

--Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 1854.

I was so scared today

There was blood leaking through my shirt

from those old scars from being shot

and nobody called, and nobody came.

False Aging - Lewis Klahr, 2008, DV