An Open Book Beside an Empty Plinth

An Open Book Beside an Empty Plinth.

An empty plinth meets an open book. You will never learn history by staring at a statue. #sculpture #history #longhorns #reading #books #library

A post shared by Christopher Landrum (@bookbread2) on Aug 21, 2017 at 12:32pm PDT

“Every scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth,” — is the fundamental law of criticism. A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text. By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.

–Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature (1849), “Ch IV: Language.”

And:

“‘I, too,’ he said, ‘have closely studied this man’s soul; but, unlike my learned friend for the prosecution, I have found something there. Indeed, I may say that I have read the prisoner’s mind like an open book.’ What he had read there was that I was an excellent young fellow, a steady, conscientious worker who did his best by his employer; that I was popular with everyone and sympathetic in others’ troubles.”

–Camus, Albert. L’Étranger. (The Stranger.) 1942. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. NY: Vintage. 1954. p. 131.