Little Gifts 2025

In 2025 the IPA in Culture Committee will send you each month a little gift giving voice to writers and showing the works of artists or AI generated pictures -- something to discover, explore, remember, linger on or simply enjoy. Also, you can access our previous little gifts here 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021.

With best wishes from the IPA in Culture Committee
Cláudia C. Antonelli (Chair) 

January
Chi siamo noi, chi è ciascuno di noi se non una combinatoria d'esperienze, d'informazioni, di letture, di immaginazioni? Ogni vita è un'enciclopedia, una biblioteca, un inventario di oggetti, un campionario di stili, dove tutto può essere continuamente rimescolato e riordinato in tutti i modi possibili.
Italo Calvino (1988), Lezioni Americane. Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio, “Molteplicità"

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.
Italo Calvino (1988), Six Memos for the Next Millennium, "Multiplicity"

April
Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.
Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis

Img: Francisco Goya, Witches Sabbath, 1797-1798
July
Para ser grande, sê inteiro: nada Teu exagera ou exclui.
Sê todo em cada coisa.
Põe quanto és No mínimo que fazes.
Assim em cada lago a lua toda Brilha, porque alta vive.
Fernando Pessoa Ode (1933).

To be great, be whole: don't exaggerate
Or leave out any part of you.
Be complete in each thing.
Put all you are Into the least of your acts.
So too in each lake, with its lofty life,
The whole moon shines.
(Translation into English by Richard Zenith)

Image source: Fernando Pessoa with his heteronyms, 2025 Image generated with the assistance of an AI model developed by OpenAI.
October
“Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is,everything exists, only because I love.”
Leo Tolstoy, in War and Peace

Image source: Leo Tolstoy in His Study - Ilya Repin, 1891
February
Au milieu de l’hiver, j’ai découvert en moi un invincible été.
Albert Camus, L’été, 1954

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
Albert Camus, L’été, 1954

Image: Edward Hopper, The Lighthouse, 1929
May
I am rooted, but I flow.
Virginia Woolf
August
Si un peu de rêve est dangereux, ce qui en guérit, ce n'est pas moins de rêve, mais plus de rêve, mais tout le rêve.
Marcel Proust

If a little dream is dangerous, what cures it is not less dreaming, but more dreaming, but all dreaming.
Marcel Proust

Image: René Magritte, The Empire of Light, 1954
November
“They can cut all the flowers, but they cannot stop the spring.”
Pablo Neruda (Chile), The Love Poems (translated by Donald Walsh, 1972)

Image source: Apple Tree (1912) by Gustav Klimt
March
En realidad nunca dejamos de ser niños, niños monstruosos llenos de pupas y de varices y de tumores y de manchas en la piel, pero niños al fin y al cabo, nunca dejamos de aferrarnos a la vida puesto que somos vida.
Roberto Bolaño

The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.
Roberto Bolaño

Image source: Massimo Bietti, South Sudan.
June
Ela seria fluida durante toda a vida. Porém o que dominara seus contornos e os atraíra a um centro, o que a iluminara contra o mundo e lhe dera íntimo poder fora o segredo.
Clarice Lispector, Início do romance O Lustre

She'd be flowing all her life. But what had dominated her edges and attracted them toward a center, what had illuminated her against the world and given her intimate power was the secret.
Clarice Lispector, Beginning of the novel The Chandelier

Image source: Henri Rousseau, The sleeping gypsy, 1897
September
He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Image source: Andrés Curruchich, 1968, The Godfathers
December
“Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.”
Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 2006

Image source: Henryk Hector Siemiradzki,'Night on the Eve of Ivan Kupala', 1880-1890