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Friday 9 September 2016

The Unique Sound of the Cricket

'All the happiness the earth possesses in not being broken down into matter and spirit was contained in the unique sound of the cricket.'



The Unique Sound of the Cricket: Édouard Manet, Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé, 1876.Stéphane Mallarmé died 118 years ago today. He wrote the letter below to his friend Eugène Lefébure, in May 1867, at age twenty-five, when he was working as a teacher in the provinces. It was, apparently, stressful, and Mallarmé came to feel that he’d entered “the Void”—a liberating (albeit terrifying) abyss of... Read More »