Day: November 13, 2016

I am writing this the morning after the U.S. presidential election. Confused, sad, grasping for words, and tired already of news outlets’ attempts at explanations and of social media finger pointing.

I keep thinking of Francisco Goya’s work, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, “The sleep of reason produces monsters”.

I think I first saw the etching in Madrid the same day I stood dwarfed in front of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, which depicts townspeople suffering the horrors of war unleashed by Nationalists. That also seems like a fitting work to contemplate just now.

Today I feel as if reason has been sleeping, and we don’t know what monsters we have unleashed.

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Images 1 (public domain) + 2 (fair use) via Wikimedia.

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