Cloud Poetry

A follower of Epicurus, Lucretius believed the world to be composed of tiny atoms moving in a void and viewed life in terms of pleasure and pain, representing good and bad.

Selected writings and testimonies of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BC) who founded a school called “The Garden”. He taught that the root of all human neurosis is death denial and the tendency for human beings to assume that death will be horrific and painful, which he claimed causes unnecessary anxiety, selfish self-protective behaviors, and hypocrisy. According to Epicurus, deat...

Selected poems of Edith Wharton, the first female writer to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Short stories from Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Widow Ching - Pirate”

Dealing with themes of decadence and eroticism, Les fleurs du mal, Charles Baudelaire’s volume of poems first published in 1857, was enormously influential in the symbolist and modernist literature movements. Read in French and English.

Kenkō was born in 1283 to a Kyoto family of hereditary Shinto priests. His times demanded adaptability to an often inconsistent and multi-layered world, and he was a man well suited to his times.

Short stories from We Others

A selection of poems by the French poet Louis Aragon: Avec André Breton, Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault, il fut l’un des animateurs du dadaïsme parisien et du surréalisme.

La chanson bien douce Paul Verlaine Écoutez la chanson bien douce Qui ne pleure que pour vous plaire. Elle est discrète, elle est légère: Un frisson d’eau sur de la mousse. La voix vous fut connue (et chère?), Mais à présent elle est voilée Comme une veuve désolée, Pourtant comme elle encore fière, Et dans les longs plis de son voile Qui palpite aux brises d'automne, Cache et montre au cœur qui s'...

Xi’an of Eight Rivers. China is made of earth, of sun-dried mud. In this part of China everything is made from the earth: the houses, the walls around cities, and villages, the tombs scattered over the countryside. Even the people. There are hills below that appear to be piles of mud set out to dry in the sun, naked, without a single tree or bush. They crowd around the landscape like the coils of...

“Funny, the way we come to understand a place by wanting to escape it”

Latin creates a sense of sacred space and time to help focus on the sense of God’s otherness.

“The Signature of All Things” by Jacob Böhme, who suggests that God marked objects with a sign, a “signature” for their purpose: the concept that every object in the real world has some hidden meaning, and particularly how these signatures interact.

A first century BC didactic poem by Lucretius (99-55 BC) explaining Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience. Lucretius explores the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind and soul; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The universe described in the poem operates according to thes...

Excerpts from Rebecca Solnit’s “Wanderlust: A history of walking”, 2000

Biblical, ancient, historical sacred texts from dead and living civilizations

JG Ballard’s dystopian novel set in a waterlogged London

Excerpts from medieval Japanese author and Buddhist monk Yoshida Kenkō’s (1283-1352) Essays on Idleness, or Tsurezuregusa.

Baudelaire’s lovely poem encouraging drunkenness

Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency by Akiko Busch

Atmosphere. A familiar yet extremely vague phenomenon The term atmosphere has its origin in the meteorological field and refers to the earth's envelope of air which carries the weather. It is only since the 18th century that it has been used metaphorically, for moods which are "in the air", for the emotional tinge of a space. Today this expression is commonly used in all European languages; it no...

If ever there was a writer in flight from his name, it was Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa is the Portuguese word for “person,” and there is nothing he less wanted to be. Again and again, in both poetry and prose, Pessoa denied that he existed as any kind of distinctive individual. “I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist,” he writes in one poem. “I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what other...

The Aleph and Other Stories

'We wear the helmet when our locks are grey.' We are they who are so far from indulging in any leisure until we die, that if circumstances permit it, we do not allow ourselves to be at leisure even when we are dying.

A collection of Confucius’ (551-479 BC) sayings expressing a moral code by which he believed everyone should live and upon which the official government examinations were based. In order to meet his moral responsibility, he believed, a man must think for himself.