John Robert Cozens (1752 - December 14, 1797), was an English draftsman and painter of romantic watercolor landscapes.

The son of the Russian-born drawing master and watercolorist, Alexander Cozens, John Robert Cozens was born in London. He studied under his father and began to exhibit some early drawings with the Society of Artists in 1767. In 1776, he displayed a large oil painting at the Royal Academy in London. 1776-79 he spent some time in Switzerland and Italy, where he drew Alpine and Italian views. In 1779 he went back to London. In 1782, he made his second visit to Italy, spending much time at Naples. In 1783, he returned to England. In 1789, he published a set of Delineations of the General Character ... of Forest Trees. Three years previous to his death he became a lunatic and was supported by Dr. Thomas Monro. He died in London.

Cozens executed watercolors in curious atmospherical effects and illusions which had some influence on Thomas Girtin and J.M.W. Turner. Indeed, his work is full of poetry. There is a solemn grandeur in his Alpine views and a sense of vastness, a tender tranquillity and a kind of mystery in most of his paintings, leaving parts in his pictures for the imagination of the spectator to dwell on and search into. John Constable called him "the greatest genius that ever touched landscape." On the other hand, Cozens never departed from his primitive, almost rudimentary, manner of painting, which causes several of his works to look very like colored engravings.

See also English school of painting

All the beautiful birds flew away

back to Africa warm nests, whereas the solitary Robin has nowhere to go.
She stays and he stays and they never meet because the rule for the ones in their species
is to stay put and alone.
It´s autumn, looks like winter, miss all the colourful birds of spring
but in the pale misty days the red chest brings some hapinness,
his song big joy.

The Cow

The friendly cow all red and white,
I love with all my heart:
She gives me cream with all her might,
To eat with apple tart.

She wanders lowing here and there,
And yet she cannot stray,
All in the pleasant open air,
The pleasant light of day;

And blown by all the wind that pass
And wet with all the showers,
She walks among the meadow´grass
And eats the meadow flowers.

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen

Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing
HallelujahHallelujah
HallelujahHallelujah
Hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you
To a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Baby I have been here before
I know this room, I've walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you.
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
Love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

There was a time you let me know
What's really going on below
But now you never show it to me, do you?
And remember when I moved in you
The holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah,Hallelujah

Three Little Birds

Dont worry about a thing, ´cause every little thing gonna be all right.
Singing: dont worry about a thing, ´cause every little thing gonna be all right!

Rise up this morning,
Smiled with the rising sun,
Three little birds
Pitch by my doorstep
Singing sweet songs
Of melodies pure and true,
Saying, (this is my message to you-ou-ou:)

Singing: dont worry bout a thing, ´cause every little thing gonna be all right.
Singing: dont worry (dont worry) ´bout a thing, cause every little thing gonna be all right!

Helpless

There is a town in north Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us
Helpless, helpless, helpless
Baby can you hear me now?
The chains are locked and tied across the door,
Baby, sing with me somehow.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us
Helpless, helpless, helpless.

Francis Bacon

The contemplation of things as they are,
Without error or confusion,
Without substitution or imposture,
Is in itself a nobler thing
Than a whole harvest of invention.

John Donne

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a
promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.

John Lilly by Laurie Anderson

Now in this book there are a lot of stories about talking animals: talking snakes, and birds, and fish; and about people who try to communicate with them.
John Lilly, the guy who says he can talk to dolphins, said he was in an aquarium and he was talking to a big whale who was swimming around and around in his tank. And the whale kept asking him questions telepathically.
And one of the questions the whale kept asking was: "Do all oceans have walls?"

They Are Not Long

Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam.
Horace , Odas 1.4

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter.
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

Ernest Dowson, 1896

ICE TIME

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander ...
Byron, 'Darkness'

In 1815, on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia, a handsome and long quiescent mountain named Tambora exploded spectacularly, killing a hundred thousand people with its blast and associated tsunamis. No-one living now has ever seen such fury. Tambora was far bigger than anything any living human has experienced. It was the biggest volcanic explosion in ten thousand years - 150 times the size of Mount St Helens, equivalent to sixty thousand Hiroshima ­sized atom bombs.

News didn't travel terribly fast in those days.
In London, The Times ran a small story - actually a letter from a merchant - seven months after the event. But by this time Tambora's effects were already being felt.
Two hundred and forty cubic kilometres of smoky ash, dust and grit had diffused through the atmosphere, obscuring the Sun's rays and causing the Earth to coo1. Sunsets were unusually but blearily colourful, an effect memorably captured by the artist J.M.W. Turner who could not have been happier, but mostly the world existed under an oppressive, dusky pall. It was this deathly dimness that inspired Byron to write the lines quoted above.

Spring never came and summer never warmed: 1816 became known as the year without summer. Crops everywhere failed to grow… Yet globally the temperature fell by less than 1 degree Celsius. The Earth´s natural thermostat is an exceedingly delicate instrument.

Bill Bryson
from A Short History of Nearly Everything

THE BIRTHPLACE OF Robinson Crusoe

was the little Pacific island of Mas-a-tierra in the Juan Fernandez group off the coast of Chile.
It was uninhabited, well wooded and mountainous, a useful point of call for a buccaneer to fill his water casks, cut wood for the gallery fire, and refresh his crew ashore without being seen.
In 1703, one of William Dampier's ships called at the island. Her quarter­master, a twenty-eight-year old Scot named Alexander Selkirk, quarrelled with his captain and asked to be left behind when the ship sailed.
No doubt he expected another ship to call soon, but in fact it was over four years before he was rescued, by Captain WoodesRogers. Rogers found 'a man clothed in goatskins who looked wilder than their first owners. He had so much forgot his language from want of use that we could scarce understand him.'
He had built him­ two huts; one he used as a kitchen, in the other he read and sang psalms. He had lived mainly on goats, cray-fish and fruit. He had tamed hundreds of cats to sleep round him at night and keep the rats from gnawing his feet. Here was Defoe's Crusoe in the making.
When accounts of the voyages were published in London, the story of Selkirk made a sensation. Journalists made much of it, one of the most popular of them, Richard Steele, giving up to it a special number of his periodical the Englishman. But it was left to Daniel Defoe to give Selkirk his pseudonymous immortality.

Recibimos a Andersen y a la infancia.

En el bicentenario del nacimiento del cuentista da­nés, Gustavo Martín Garzo nos explica por qué la vida sin amor carece de sentido.

Augusto Monterroso dijo que la literatura aspiraba a representar la totalidad de la vida, y puesto que la vida era triste también la literatura, la gran literatura, lo tenía que ser.
Pero hay obras que son tristes a su pesar, porque lo que cuentan lo es y no quieren renunciar a reflejado, y hay obras que lo son por vocación, ya que parecen haber surgido para enfrentarse a ese enigma, el de la tristeza.
La obra de Andersen pertenece a ese segundo grupo, y la razón de su éxito arrollador, de su indiscutible poder de seducción, me atrevo a pensar que se debe precisamen­te a eso. En realidad, todos los personajes de Andersen buscan denodada­mente el amor y no logran encontrarlo. Ésa es la enseñanza de sus cuentos: que la vida sólo merece la pena si hay amor, y que éste no con­siste en pedir sino en dar. Por eso ni a la princesa de Los cisnes salvajes ni a la protagonista de La sirenita les importa su sufrimiento. La princesa tendrá que tejer camisas de ortigas con sus propias manos para salvar a sus hermanos; y a la sirenita el simple hecho de andar le causará un dolor tan insoportable que apenas podrá mantenerse en pie. Pero esto no es bastante, ya que mientras llevan a cabo su misión, ninguna de ellas podrá hablar. Es decir, que tienen que abstenerse de pedir.
A algo así es a lo que se refiere Simone Weil cuando, al analizar el cuento de los cisnes, escribe: “Actuar nunca es difícil: siempre estamos actuando en exceso y dispersándonos incesantemente en actos desordenados. Hacer seis ca­misas de ortigas y estar callados: ese es nuestro único medio de adquirir un poder”
Eso es la tristeza en los cuentos de Andersen, una forma de conseguir poder.
W. Faulkner, en una de sus novelas, hizo decir a uno de sus personajes: «Entre la nada y la pena elijo la pena». Y eso hacen todos los grandes personajes de Andersen: entregarse a la pena como si fuera la más dulce y extraña de las aventuras.

Gustavo Martín Garzo

John Steinbeck, Viajes con Charley

Las secoyas, una vez vistas, dejan una impresión o crean una visión que permanece con uno siempre.
Nadie ha conseguido nunca pintar o fotografiar con éxito una de ellas.
La sensación que producen es intransferible. Llega de ellas silencio y sobrecogimento. No es sólo su talla increíble, ni el color que parece cambiar y modificarse ante tus propios ojos, no, no son como ningún otro árbol que yo conozca, son embajadores de otra época.
Tienen el misterio ­de los helechos que desaparecieron hace un millón de años convirtiéndose en el carbón de la era carbonífera. Poseen una luz y una sombra propias.
Hasta los hombres más vanos y más despreocupados e irreverentes se sienten dominados por un asombro, un respeto mágicos ante la presencia de las secoyas. Respeto ... ésa es la palabra. Siente uno la necesidad ­de inclinarse ante unos soberanos indiscutibles.
Conozco a estos grandes desde mi más tierna infancia, he vivido entre ellos, he acampado y dormido junto ­a sus cálidos y monstruosos cuerpos, y pese a la estrecha relación que he tenido con ellos no he sido capaz de llegar a menospreciarlos nunca.
Y se trata de un sentimiento que no es exclusivamente mío ni mucho menos.

Missing My Son, Tom Waits

I was in a line at the supermarket the other day, and uhm... y'know, I had all my things on the little conveyor belt there. And uh... there's a gal in front of me that is uh.. well, she's staring at me and I'm getting a little nervous and uh, she continues to stare at me. And I uh, I keep looking the other way. And then, finally she comes over closer to me and she says: "I apologise for staring, that must have been annoying. I, I... You look so much like my son, who died. I just can't take my eyes off you." And she precedes to go into her purse and she pulls out a photograph of her son who'd died. And uh, he looks absolutely nothing like me. In fact he's... Chinese. Uh... anyway, we chatted a little bit. And uh, she says: "I'm sorry, I have to ask you. Would you mind, as I leave the supermarket here, would you mind saying "Goodbye mom" to me? I, I know it's a strange request but I haven't heard my son saying "Goodbye mom" to me, and "So long" and it would mean so much to me to hear it. And uh, if you don't mind I... " And I said: "Well, you know, okay, yeah, sure. Eh.. uh... I can say that." And, and so, she uh gets her groceries all checked out. And uh, as she's going out the door she waves at me and she hollers across the store: "Goodbye son!" And I look up and I wave and I say: "Goodbye mom!" And then she goes, and uh... So I get my few things there, on the conveyor belt and the checker checks out my things. And uh, and he gives me the total and he says: "That'll be four hundred and seventy nine dollars." Uh... and I said: "Well, how is that possible! I've only got a little tuna fish, and uh some skimmed milk, and uh mustard and a loaf of bread..." He goes: "Well, well you're also paying for the groceries for your mother. She uh, told me you'd take care of the bill for her." And I said: "Well, wait a minute! That's not my mother!" And he says: "Well I distinctly heard her say as she left the store "Bye son!" and you said "Bye mom!" and so what are you trying to say here, uh..." I said: "Well, JESUS!" And I looked out into the parking lot and she was just getting into her car. And I ran out there. And she was just closing the door, and she had a little bit of her leg sticking out of the door and she was pulling away and I grabbed her leg and I started PULLING it! Just the way... I'm pulling yours...

Pegaojos , Hans Christian Andersen

Al anochecer, cuando los niños están aún sentados a la mesa o en su escabel, viene un duende llamado Pegaojos; sube la escalera quedito, quedito, pues va descalzo, sólo en calcetines; abre las puertas sin hacer ruido y, ¡chitón!, vierte en los ojos de los pequeñuelos leche dulce, con cuidado, con cuidado, pero siempre bastante para que no puedan tener los ojos abiertos y, por tanto, verlo.
Se desliza por detrás, les sopla levemente en la nuca y los hace quedar dormidos.
Pero no les duele, pues Pegaojos es amigo de los niños; sólo quiere que se estén quietecitos, y para ello lo mejor es aguardar a que estén acostados.
Deben estarse quietos y callados, para que él pueda contarles sus cuentos.
Cuando ya los niños están dormidos, Pegaojos se sienta en la cama.
Va bien vestido; lleva un traje de seda, pero es imposible decir de qué color, pues tiene destellos verdes, rojos y azules, según como se vuelva.
Y lleva dos paraguas, uno debajo de cada brazo.
Uno de estos paraguas está bordado con bellas imágenes, y lo abre sobre los niños buenos; entonces ellos durante toda la noche sueñan los cuentos más deliciosos; el otro no tiene estampas, y lo despliega sobre los niños traviesos, los cuales se duermen como marmotas y por la mañana se despiertan sin haber tenido ningún sueño.

Yosemite

If you were to give me the pleasure of showing you Yosemite Valley for the first time,
I know just how I would want to do it. I would take you by night from the San Joaquin Valley up through the forested mountains and out to the Valley's rim, so that when sunrise carne you would be standing on Glacier Point. Up before dawn, you would lean against the railing, trying to see down into the shadows for the first sight of something whose descriptions you never quite believed.
Perhaps a shining morning star would be burning in steel-blue space over the notched rnystery of the horizon. Even by its light you could make out the great looming hulk of Half Dome, nearly 2.000 feet above our eyrie. I can well imagine your reactions with the coming of the first bit of sun­light. The constant thunder of the falls leads your eye to find their whiteness as the deep cut canyons are first illuminated.
Bit by bit, the obscuring darkness melts away, sculptured gray walls emerge, and the form and incredible depth of the canyons becomes apparent. You can begin to see where the heavy, scouring glaciers came grinding down the tributary canyons, to meet in a giant Y and gouge out the deep, straight-walled valley which lies more than 3,000 feet below our vantage point.
You suddenly become aware of a growing chorus of chirps and squeaks and scufflings as birds and squirrels begin to stir in the nearby trees. And soon afterward you see the first kindling of light on the summit crags of Mount Hoffinan, far to the north across the canyon. Gradually the golden light reaches farther down the slopes, moving slowly over cliff and forest, firing every rack and tree into green-golden flame.
Soon the shadows in which we stand will be swept away as the sun bursts upon us with an atomic blaze over the helmet curve of Half Dome.
Ansel Adams
From "Yosemite," Travel and Camera , October 1946

Bobby McFerrin´s Don't Worry, Be Happy

YouTube - Bobby Mcferrin - Don't Worry, Be Happy


Here is a little song I wrote
You might want to sing it note for note
Don't worry be happy
In every life we have some trouble
When you worry you make it double Don't worry, be happy......
Ain't got no place to lay your head
Somebody came and took your bed Don't worry, be happy
The land lord say your rent is late
He may have to litigate Don't worry, be happy
Look at me I am happy Don't worry, be happy
Here I give you my phone number When you worry call me I make you happy
Don't worry, be happy
Ain't got no cash, ain't got no style
Ain't got not girl to make you smile
But don't worry be happy
Cause when you worry Your face will frown
And that will bring everybody down So don't worry, be happy (now).....

There is this little song I wrote
I hope you learn it note for note
Like good little children
Don't worry, be happy
Listen to what I say
In your life expect some trouble
But when you worry You make it double
Don't worry, be happy...... Don't worry don't do it, be happy
Put a smile on your face
Don't bring everybody down like this
Don't worry, it will soon past
Whatever it is Don't worry, be happy.

Ben Harper

With My Own Two Hands
I can change the world
With my own two hands
Make a better place
With my own two hands
Make a kinder place
With my own two hands
With my own
With my own two hands
I can make peace on earth
With my own two hands
I can clean up the earth
With my own two hands
I can reach out to you
With my own two hands
With my own
With my own two hands
I´m gonna make it a brighter place
I´m gonna make it a safer place
I´m gonna help the human race
With my own
With my own two hands
I can hold you
With my own two hands
I can comfort you
With my own two hands
But you got to use
Use your own two hands
Use your own
Use your own two hands
With our own
With our own two hands
With my own
With my own two hands

My Favourite Things

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with string
These are a few of my favorite things.
Cream coloured ponies and crisp apple strudel
Door bells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things.
Girls in white dresses and blue satin sashes
Snow-flakes that stay on my nose and eye-lashes
Silver white winters that melt into spring
These are a few of my favorite things,
When the dog bites, When the bee stings
When I'm feeling sad, I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feel so bad.

R.E.M.

Shiny happy people
Shiny happy people laughing
Meet me in the crowd
People people
Throw your love around
Love me love me
Take it into town
Happy happy
Put it in the ground
Where the flowers grow
Gold and silver shine

Shiny happy people holding hands
Shiny happy people laughing

Everyone around love them, love them
Put it in your hands
Take it take it
There's no time to cry
Happy happy
Put it in your heart
Where tomorrow shines
Gold and silver shine