palimpsest :

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palimpsest


  • n  a manuscript (usually written on papyrus or parchment) on which more than one text has been written with the earlier writing incompletely erased and still visible

  • Translated into design terms, palimpsest stands for the idea that, given a chance, the history of a place can and will rise from its grave.
  • Several photographs capture these moments, showing Ezra Pound's face as a palimpsest of his tangled character, the battleground over which genius and crankiness had struggled for .
  • It isn't so much a story about 1963 as it is a palimpsest of the years of history that preceded it, all of which shape the future and private lives.
News & Articles

  • Curator-artist William Cordova’s speciality is diversity in art
    Two pieces in the exhibit palimpsest have extra stories to tell. All the artworks subtly uncover some kind of history or tale — one definition of palimpsest is “a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.” But these two pieces help reveal a little bit of the history of the artist who curated ...
    Oct. 24, 2013 - Miami Herald
Quotes

  • Jawaharlal Nehru in Hindu
    ...there been no respect for the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person, India would never have acquired the status of what Jawaharlal Nehru called "an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been...
  • Dominique de Villepin in Telegraph.co.uk
    Our country advances only in crises and in tragedy,writes Mr de Villepin. "Our history is written, like a palimpsest, on the body of a nation stitched with scars."
  • Edmund White in New York Times
    (Bloomsbury, $12.99.) "Flânerie is the best way to impose a personal vision on the palimpsest of Paris," White writes of his strolls around the city where he lived for 16 years.

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