Imagine Studying In The Library After School And Taking A Nap In The Poetry Section With Oscar Wilde’s

Classic literature

spring is not gentle

trembling towards tomorrow

trepidation of love now renewed;

it is a scab scraped over winter

and its bloody, weeping wounds.

“The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.”

— Voltaire (via philosophyquotes)

“We read to know we’re not alone.” - William Nicholson, Shadowlands

A Dark Academic’s Guide to Recovery

Lending yourself to an ancient and forbidden ritual, offering yourself to the pure-selfishness of pulling the roots from underneath you and replanting them again in the wet and dark soil. To feel the candlelight flicker on your lips as you recite an ode to yourself and the divinity within your fingertips. 

Indulge in dark literature. Consume the words with a hunger that becomes insatiable, drinking the stories that haunt your bones like wine brewed from the Cask of Amontillado. 

Accept that thoughts will cut through your mind, and respond to them with poetry. Respond to self-deprecation with powerful epigrams, for you are Aphrodite, and you bend the wills of men, as jasmine flows from your voice; untouchable from cusp of mortality. 

Wear a locket and fill it’s silver lining with a horcrux: a dried petal of the rose from a lover, the black and white photographs of handsome and deceased monarchs or scholars, and the captured air of autumn’s first kiss.

Adore the moon and the moon alone, for you are born from her celestial dust, and you will return to her in your late night walks outside the walls of your favourite library. 

Collapse on the hillside moor and scream into the air as though you were in Wuthering Heights, falling and crying into the heather and dew, releasing the anxieties and fears that only the earth will hear. She will comfort you more than tracing the wet ink along your parchment. 

dark academia books as penguin classics

@olivieblake

Tabula Rasa

Noun

[tab-yuh-luh rah-suh, -zuh, rey-]

1. a mind not yet affected by experiences, impressions, etc.

2. anything existing undisturbed in its original pure state.

Origin: In Latin tabula rasa means “erased tablet, a tablet rubbed clean (of writing).” Tabula has many meanings: “flat board, plank, table, notice board, notice, game board, public document, deed, will.” For schoolchildren the schoolmaster’s command Manum dē tabulā “Hand(s) off the tablet!” meant “Pencils down!” Rasa is the past participle of radere “to scrape, scratch, shave, clip.” The inside surfaces of a folded wooden tablet were raised along the edges and filled with wax for writing. The wax could be erased by smoothing with the blunt end of a stylus (more correctly stilus) or by mild heat. The Latin phrase is a translation of Greek pinakìs ágraphos “tablet with nothing written on it, blank tablet,” from Aristotle’s De Anima (Greek Perì Psychês, “On the Soul): “What it [the mind] thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing tablet (pinakìs) on which nothing is yet actually written (ágraphos).” Tabula rasa entered English in the 16th century.

“The alarm wakes him, and he opens his eyes to a new day. He feels rested, reset, a tabula rasa.” - Lisa Genova, Inside The O'Briens, 2015

ah, the eternal struggle of maintaining the balance of apollonian and dionysian in oneself

How to Save Your Own Life, Erica Jong

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | We Should All Be Feminists | 2014