Deoridhe's photographic exploration of Second Life and the world.
"You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention." Her voice was gentle, and without pity. "Never run," she said. "Walk slowly, and pretend to be thinking of something else. Sing a song, say a poem, do your tricks, but walk slowly and she may not follow. Walk very slowly, magician."
So they fled across the night together, step by step, the tall man in black and the horned white beast. The magician crept as close to the unicorn's light as he dared, for beyond it moved hungry shadows, the shadows of the sounds that the harpy made as she destroyed the little there was to destroy of the Midnight Carnival. But another sound followed them long after these had faded, followed them into morning on a strange road — the tiny, dry sound of a spider weeping.
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
The unicorn was gray and still. "There is magic on me," she said. "Why did you not tell me?"
"I thought you knew," the magician answered gently. "After all, didn't you wonder how it could be that they recognized you?" Then he smiled, which made him look a little older. "No, of course not. You never would wonder about that."
"There has never been a spell on me before," the unicorn said. She shivered long and deep. "There has never been a world in which I was not known."
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
"Which areas, events, or ideas does our attention revolve around or return to?"The Center is both a deceptively simple concept, and a fiendishly difficult one. When I was dwelling on the idea, though, I kept coming back to the psychological concept of "locus of control" - that is, where the control of a person is located within their psyche (either realistically or not). Children have an external locus of control; people often develop external loci of control in abusive or discriminatory situations, and an internal locus of control is central to developing as a psychologically healthy adult. The locus, the center, is where we return to time and again in our lives and in our art; it is what we might circle around like a planet in orbit around the sun, or what might draw us in again and again like the driving forces of arrows pointing to a single place. Some people revolve around other people, some people revolve around themselves, and some people revolve around some critical idea or object of their attention.
"What is plucked will grow again,
What is slain lives on,
What is stolen will remain —
What is gone is gone."
"What is sea-born dies on land,
Soft is trod upon.
What is given burns the hand —
What is gone is gone."
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
![Colour! Colour! Colour! Week 6: Dark Orange [Brown Tone]](https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1618/24411551853_7b1c55e311.jpg)
"Unicorns are immortal. It is their nature to live alone in one place: usually a forest where there is a pool clear enough for them to see themselves-for they are a little vain, knowing themselves to be the most beautiful creatures in all the world, and magic besides. They mate very rarely, and no place is more enchanted than one where a unicorn has been born. The last time she had seen another unicorn the young virgins who still came seeking her now and then had called to her in a different tongue; but then, she had no idea of months and years and centuries, or even of seasons. It was always spring in her forest, because she lived there, and she wandered all day among the great beech trees, keeping watch over the animals that lived in the ground and under bushes, in nests and caves, earths and treetops. Generation after generation, wolves and rabbits alike, they hunted and loved and had children and died, and as the unicorn did none of these things, she never grew tired of watching them."
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
You're in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. It's crawling toward you...
You reach down and flip the tortoise over on its back.
The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can't. Not with out your help. But you're not helping.
Why aren't you helping?
--paraphrased from the Blade Runner interrogation scene.
