A Quote by William Butler Yeats
This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.
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London perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets... To walk alone through London is the greatest rest.
Sometimes when she is able to spend the night with him they are wakened by the three minarets of the city beginning their prayers before dawn. He walks with her through the indigo markets that lie between South Cairo and her home. The beautiful songs of faith enter the air like arrows, one minaret answering another, as if passing on a rumor of the two of them as they walk through the cold morning air, the smell of charcoal and hemp already making the air profound. Sinners in a holy city.
What I wanted to do was to look at the powerlessness that I felt as - and continue to feel at times - as a black man in the American streets. I know what it feels like to walk through the streets, knowing what it is to be in this body and how certain people respond to that body.
The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I've never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.
As we have said, robust souls are sometimes almost, but not entirely, overthrown by strokes of misfortune....Despair has steps leading upward. From total depression we rise to despondency, from despondency to affliction, from affliction to melancholy. Melancholy is a twilight state in which suffering transmutes into a somber joy....Melancholy is the enjoyment of being sad.
I lost my mother early, I've sometimes felt I haven't had anyone to show me the way. When I look to the future there's only a blank. "I can't see past the point where I am," the speaker says at one point - "like you, I'm just passing through." If my mother were still alive I imagine I'd have a clearer sense of what a meaningful, vital life might look like 25 years down the line.
Proportion ... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist ... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way ... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.
The London streets are paths of loveliness; the very omnibuses look like colored archangels, their laps filled full of little trustful souls.
Generally, we use light to illuminate other things. I like the thingness, the materiality of light itself. So it feels like it's occupying the space, making a plane, being something that was there, not just passing through. Because light is just passing through. I make these spaces that seem to arrest it for our perception.
New York feels vibrant... It feels electric to walk the streets at night.
New York feels vibrant It feels electric to walk the streets at night.
Every day, I walk the streets with my head held high, but deep down inside, sometimes I'm like, 'I just hope I can get through the day.'
Air Max is from when we were running the streets. It was comfortable to wear in London, whether you were going out to a club or kicking a ball in the streets. Those kinds of things stick in my mind from the young, magical, fantasy years of my life.
When you are starting away, leaving your more familiar fields, for a little adventure like a walk, you look at every object with a traveler's, or at least with historical, eyes; you pause on the first bridge, where an ordinary walk hardly commences, and begin to observe and moralize like a traveler. It is worth the while to see your native village thus sometimes, as if you were a traveler passing through it, commenting on your neighbors as strangers.
It is a grave misconception to regard the mystical progress as passing mostly through ecstasies and raptures. On the contrary, it passes just as much through broken hearts and bruised emotions, through painful sacrifices and melancholy renunciations.
Clear skies and clean air must become the new normal. We must re-design our cities, reclaiming the streets for cycling and walking, allowing people to walk along streets unpolluted by traffic.
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