image by Teju Cole
This extraordinary series of passages from the Cassandra Pages with stunning photos by Teju Cole arrives to me at an interesting time. Wings are at work...
No feature of angels annoyed me more than their wings: impractical, unlikely wings, from a biological point of view entirely false. I always thought of the points of attachment and articulation, and reasoned that for a man to fly with wings on his back, he would need enormous back muscles. Angels, in most depictions through the ages, looked like men with white toy wings tacked on. They were an infantile fantasy, made to bear a spiritual burden that they were, to my eyes at least, remarkably ill-suited for. Angels were just about as relevant to my life as the preprocessed sentiment of Hallmark cards or top-forty love songs: in other words, irrelevant.
