Giorgio de Chirico „Metafizyczne muzy”, olej na płótnie, 1918. Wystawa “Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity”, Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Wenecja 2022.

“‘Oh, Hebdomeros,’ she said. ‘I am Immortality. Names have their gender, or rather their sex, as you once said with much finesse, and verbs, alas, are declined. Have you ever thought of my death? Have you ever thought about the death of my death? Have you ever thought about my life? One day, oh brother….’
But she spoke no more. Seated on the fragment of a broken column, she gently placed one hand on his shoulder and with the other took hold of the hero’s right hand. Hebdomeros, his elbow leaning on the ruined column, and his chin leaning on his hand, thought no longer… His thought, encountering the pure sound of the voice he had just heard, yielded slowly and finally abandoned itself altogether. It abandoned itself to the caressing waves, floated towards strange and unknown shores. It floated in a warmth like that of the setting sun, smiling, as it sets, towards the cerulean solitudes.
Meanwhile, between the sky and the vast extent of the seas, green islands, marvelous islands, passed slowly by, as the ships of a squadron pass before the flagship, while long strings of sublime birds, white and immaculate, flew by, singing”.

Giorgio de Chirico Hebdomeros (1929), transl. Margaret Crosland (1988)

Giorgio de Chirico, letter to Guillaume Apollinaire:
“The Ephesian teaches us that time does not exist and that on the great curve of eternity the past is the same as the future. This might be what the Romans meant with their image of Janus, the god with two faces; and every night in dream, in the deepest hours of rest, the past and future appear to us as equal, memory blends with prophecy in a mysterious union”.

“Schopenhauer himself, in his Essay on the Vision of the Spirits, a text well-known to de Chirico, sets the prophetic dream alongside the vision of spirits in a dimension that annuls time: ‘According to this, we must, therefore, first attribute prophetic dreams to the fact that in deep sleep dreaming is enhanced to a somnambulistic clairvoyance […]. The objective world is a mere phenomenon of the brain. For the order and conformity to law thereof which are based on space, time, and causality (as brain-functions), are to some extent set aside in somnambulistic clairvoyance. Thus in consequence of the Kantian doctrine of the ideality of space and time, we see that the thing-in-itself, that which alone is the truly real in all phenomena as being free from those two forms of the intellect, knows no distinction between near and remote, between present, past, and future […]. For if time is not a determination of the real nature of things, then, in respect thereof, before and after are without meaning; accordingly, it must be possible for an event to be known just as well before it has happened as after. The art of soothsaying, whether in the dream, somnambulistic prophetic vision, second sight, or anything else, consists only in discovering the path to the freedom of knowledge from the condition of time’ […]”.

A. Schopenhauer Essay on Spirit Seeing and Everything Connected Therewith (1851).
Lorenzo Canova The Arrival of the Revenants. Giorgio de Chirico and Neometaphysical Art at the Frontiers of Time (2016), transl. Denis Gailor.