A Little Light
Words by Valeria Luiselli
Acrylic on panel
Font: Optima (Herman Zapf, 1958)
40" x 30"
2020
$800
Font: Optima (Herman Zapf, 1958)
40" x 30"
2020
$800
ORIGINAL CONTEXT
Lost Children Archive
2019, HarperCollins page 59-60 "This last line was underlined in pencil, then circled in black ink and also flagged in the margin with an exclamation mark..."
...I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures--little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue--that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling. When someone else's words enter your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They're not necessarily illuminating. A match struck alight in a dark hallway, the lit tip of a cigarette smoked in bed at midnight, embers in a dying chimney: none of those things has enough light of its own to reveal anything. Neither do anyone's words. But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate." |