Medieval missionary discovering the point where heaven and earth meet, twentieth-century coloration of black-and-white engraving from The Atmosphere, by Camille Flammarion, 1888.
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Miscellany
While on his deathbed in 1849, the Japanese artist Hokusai said to those gathered around him that he wished he could live another ten years. He paused, and went on: “If I had another five years, even, I could have become a real painter.” Then he died, at the age of eighty-nine.
The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.
—Paul Valéry, 1931
