I love this unique take on the pain scale

After my surgery, it's never been more than a Picasso, even on the bike. mostly hung around a Rembrandt-Dürer. That's not bad, considering that without the surgery, I was at a Courbet and feeling like I would pass out from the pain.

This a remarkable story, though

Blind man in Paris creates visions

Montalembert lost his sight in 1978, when two men forced their way into his New York City home looking for money. They stripped him, beat him and threatened to stab him. When the artist struggled to defend himself, one of the intruders threw what felt like hot liquid in his face. It was a base paint remover that burned his retinas.

Doctors stitched his eyelids closed, as they will likely remain for the rest of his life. The attackers were never found.

Since that day, he has created detailed visions from memory, almost the way a painter fills a blank canvas. To Montalembert, the exercise is a way of survival.

"I am afraid that the memory I have of the visible world will disappear little by little, to be replaced by an abstract universe of sound, smell, and touch," he writes in his new book, "Invisible," a poetic compilation written in English that includes excerpts from his diary and his first book, "Eclipse."

"My ability to create images absolutely must not atrophy. I must remain capable of bringing back the world I looked at intensely for 35 years."

To wake his mind into "seeing," he puts himself in visually rich surroundings that inspire him to imagine what he can no longer see. This gives him "a sense of life," an antidote to the isolation that blindness can impose.

"The stronger a visual surrounding you find yourself in, the more, maybe, your brain will catch something," he writes.

Thanks for the link from @Flipbooks as retweeted by @pfanderson.

For those of you who love Maurice Sendak's work

An excellent look into the writer/illustrator's life and personality can be found in:

Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are

Things I didn't know about Mr Sendak:

1. The son of Polish-Jewish immigrants, he lost many relatives in the Holocaust.
   
2. Gay, his partner of 50 years died last year. He never told his parents he was gay.
   
3. He recently turned 80, despite having a heart attack at 39 and a triple by-pass recently.