Welcome to
. This post is part of our Venus’ Notebook series — a compendium of beautiful things. For the full map of Cosmographia posts, see here.Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
1. The Fallen Angel (detail) — Alexandre Cabanel (1847)
2. Dylan Thomas, from “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” (1939)
Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.
3. The Fury of Achilles — Charles-Antoine Coypel (1737)
4. Maya Angelou
The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land. Ye’ll wake more than the dogs.
5. The Great Day of His Wrath — John Martin (c. 1851)
6. Cormac McCarthy, from Blood Meridian (1985)
Declare your jihad on thirteen enemies you cannot see — egoism, arrogance, conceit, selfishness, greed, lust, intolerance, anger, lying, cheating, gossiping and slandering. If you can master and destroy them, then you will be ready to fight the enemy you can see.
7. Orestes Pursued by the Furies — William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1862)
8. Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, from The Incoherence of the Philosophers (1095)
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognised that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.
9. Pollice Verso (Thumbs Down) — Jean-Léon Gérôme (1872)
10. Marcus Aurelius, from Meditations (c. 161-180 AD)
Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.
11. Salome — Pierre Bonnaud (c. 1900)
12. Gautama (c. 6-5th centuries BC)
Me miserable! Which way shall I fly Infinite wrath and infinite despair? Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell; And in the lowest deep a lower deep, Still threat'ning to devour me, opens wide, To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.
13. Plutus — Gustave Doré (1861)
14. John Milton, from Paradise Lost (1667)
Men in rage strike those that wish them best.
15. The Struggle for Woman — Franz Von Stuck (1905)
16. William Shakespeare, from Othello (1604)
Love your rage, not your cage.
17. Timoclea Kills Her Rapist — Elisabetta Sirani (1659)
18. Alan Moore, from V for Vendetta (1990)
When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols...
19. Witches going to their Sabbath — Luis Ricardo Falero (1878)
20. Herman Hesse, from Steppenwolf (1927)
I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.
21. Judith Beheading Holofernes — Artemisia Gentileschi (1611)
22. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, from Frankenstein (1818)
Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.
23. The Wrath of Achilles — Louis Édouard Fournier (1881)
24. Homer, from The Iliad (c. 8th century BC)
It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.
25. The Wrath of the Seas — Ivan Aivazovsky (1886)
26. Albert Camus, from The Stranger (1942)
Learn this from me. Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.
27. The Murder of Pelias by His Daughters — Georges Moreau de Tours (1878)
28. Mitch Albon, from The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)
Only here's what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight toward a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?...If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or...is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?
29. Juno in the Underworld — Jan Brueghel the Elder (1598)
30. Donna Tartt, from The Goldfinch (2013)
I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe; I told it not, my wrath did grow.
31. The Stygian Lake, with the Ireful Sinners Fighting — William Blake (c. 1824-7)
32. William Blake, from “A Poison Tree” (1794)
The fiercest anger of all, the most incurable, Is that which rages in the place of dearest love.
33. The Rage of Hercules — Alessandro Turchi (c. 1620s)
34. Euripedes (c. 5th century BC)
Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.
35. The Revolt — Luigi Russolo (1911)
36. Grace Paley
Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.
37. Hercules — Néstor Martín-Fernández de la Torre (c. 1920)
38. , from Moab is My Washpot (An Autobiography) (1997)
When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing.
39. The Wrath of Achilles — François-Léon Benouville (1847)
40. Octavia E. Butler, from Fledgling (2005)
Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.
41. Salomé holding the severed head of John the Baptist — Gyula Éder (1907)
42. Malcom X (c. 20th century)
Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.
43. Sisyphus — Titian (1549)
44. Aristotle (c. 4th century BC)
Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.
45. Saturn (detail) — Peter Paul Rubens (1636)
46. Anna Carson, from Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (2006)
Out of doubt, out of dark to the day's rising I came singing into the sun, sword unsheathing. To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!
47. Satan Summoning his Legions — Sir Thomas Lawrence (1797)
48. J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Return of the King (1955)
Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
Beatiful post
(I've huge problems with anger and rage. I'm really scared of myself I guess when I get like that-thus I deduce that I can do harm, and I do plenty of illogical things to turn it somehow. It usually turns onto me. It's interesting even now, how I read this post-it's like I'm distanced, like I'd be devoured if I come closer. )
Gosh! I love what I'm seeing and reading here! While it's delightful to rediscover paintings I adore (special mention for Artemisia Gentileschi's painting, which I had the chance to see again when I recently visited the Uffizi Gallery), it's just as enjoyable to discover new ones. My pleasure is even greater when these visual gems are accompanied by such poignant quotes, with a special fondness for Milton and Blake!