Yannis Stavrou: Painting & Books...

Summer 2009

50 new bookmarks from the artworks of Yannis Stavrou have just been circulated...

at POLITEIA Bookstores, 1 Asklipiou Street, Athens, Greece

A farewell to smoking...

Yannis Stavrou, Change of Night Patrol, oil on canvas

July 30, the last day of smoking in Greece...
A farewell to the companion of our thoughts, imagination, melancholy - in nice & bad days...

Some quotes about smoking:

Smoke your pipe and be silent; there’s only wind and smoke in the world.

Irish Proverb

Tobacco, divine, rare super excellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all panaceas, potable gold and philosopher’s stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases.

Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy

A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

Rudyard Kipling, The Betrothed

My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.

Winston Churchill

I promised myself that if ever I had some money that I would savor a cigar each day after lunch and dinner. This is the only resolution of my youth that I have kept, and the only realized ambition which has not brought disillusion.

Somerset Maugham

It has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake.

To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know because I've done it a thousand times.

I make it a rule never to smoke while I' m sleeping.

Mark Twain

Man is the great deserter of being. *

Yannis Stavrou, Sunset on Acropolis, oil on canvas

*Emil Cioran, a great philosopher, a great poet...
The philosopher who touches upon the substance of the human nature.
Words are not enough. Let's enjoy some of his quotations...

• Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.-
  

- Drawn and Quartered

• Man is the great deserter of being.

- The Fall into Time

• Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.

- The New Gods

• From denial to denial, his existence is diminished: vaguer and more unreal than a syllogism of sighs, how could he still be a creature of flesh and blood? Anemic, he rivals the Idea itself; he has abstracted himself from his ancestors, from his friends, from every soul and himself; in his veins, once turbulent, rests a light from another world. Liberated from what he has lived, unconcerned by what he will live; he demolishes the signposts on all his roads, and wrests himself from the dials of all time. "I shall never meet myself again," he decides, happy to turn his last hatred against himself, happier still to annihilate--in his forgiveness--all beings, all things.

- A Short History of Decay

• What life is left him robs him of what reason is left him. Trifles or scourges--the passing of a fly or the cramps of the planet--horrify him equally. With his nerves on fire, he would like the Earth to be made of glass, to shatter it to smithereens; and with what thirst would fling himself toward the stars to reduce them to powder, one by one.

- A Short History of Decay

• If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

- Tears and Saints

• The only profitable conversations are with enthusiasts who have ceased being so—with the ex-naïve…Calmed down at last, they have taken, willy-nilly, the decisive step toward knowledge— that impersonal version of disappointment.

- Drawn and Quartered

• As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.

- Tears and Saints

• What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and consent to exist.

- Drawn and Quartered

• My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

- The Trouble with Being Born

• We smile, because no answer is conceivable, because the answer would be even more meaningless than the question.

- The Trouble with Being Born

• I feel I am free but I know I am not.

- The Trouble with Being Born

__________________________________

Source: Cioran.eu

The God Abandons Anthony...*

Yannis Stavrou, Nocturnal, oil on canvas

The contemporary poetry of Konstantine P. Kavafis - a poem for our dramatic days...

"The God Abandons Anthony", by Konstaninos P. Kavafis *

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don't mourn your luck that's failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive -- don't mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don't fool yourself, don't say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don't degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
And listen with deep emotion, but not
with whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen -- your final delectation -- to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

____________________________
Source: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-god-abandons-anthony/

A journey...

Yannis Stavrou, Portrait of a Young Woman, oil on canvas

"L'Invitation au Voyage", Charles Baudelaire

Imagine, ma petite,
Dear sister mine, how sweet
Were we to go and take our pleasure
Leisurely, you and I—
To lie, to love, to die
Off in that land made to your measure!
A land whose suns' moist rays,
Through the skies' misty haze,
Hold quite the same dark charms for me
As do your scheming eyes
When they, in their like wise,
Shine through your tears, perfidiously.


Mon enfant, ma soeur,
Songe à la douceur,
D'aller là-bas, vivre ensemble!
Aimer à loisir,
Aimer et mourir,
Au pays qui te ressemble!
Les soleils mouillés,
De ces ciels brouillés,
Pour mon esprit ont les charmes,
Si mystérieux,
De tes traîtres yeux,
Brillant à travers leurs larmes.

Charles Baudelaire, from "L'Invitation au Voyage"