The fear of freedom

Is it lonely to stand so tall?
A mountain with nothing, no one else, in its view.
Is it dry to find you have no fear left,
and to know that the length of the universe is nothing but however many steps you take?
Is it terrible to be infinitely alive? 
To have nowhere else, no end, no way to die?
How long,
how long,
how long is it, exactly, to be free?

1912, Gerald E. Jones. The American annual of photography, Tennant and Ward. Harold B. Lee Library via Brigham Young University.

Life

Life is pointless as a striving, but marvellous as an allowance. 

1912, Ernest Claypole. The American annual of photography, Harold B. Lee Library via Brigham Young University

Of death and fake flowers

 There’s something horribly ugly about fake flowers. Even the most beautifully crafted, true-to-real flower can’t escape the obscenity true to every fake flower. What is that obscenity? What is that unignorable ugliness? It is how they are vacant of change; how they do not age, and come to eventual death. Their never-ending plastic poise, or paper composure, is precisely the reason why fake flowers can never truly be beautiful. 

This brings us to the question—Can there be beauty without death? If you knew that something would be there forever, perpetually, would it still be beautiful? Would you want to breathe it all in right now, if you knew it’ll be there waiting tomorrow, day after, and after…? There can be no beauty without death. Because, the one and only true sign of life—the very premise of all things love and beauty—is death itself. 

1917, Sadie Singer at the Beston Floral Supply Co. Hine, Lewis Wickes; National Child Labor Committee Collection.