Ad-meliora-tendo - I Strive To Higher Things

Dark Academia Procrastination 

‣ watching the clouds pass by your window 

‣ completely changing your spotify playlists 

‣ reading up on long-dead philosophers and some new ones 

‣ boiling the kettle three separate times because you keep forgetting that you put it on already 

‣ painting your nails 

‣ listening to the trees and the birds within them 

‣ flipping through unread books hoping one will catch your attention 

‣ reading poetry and tasting it on the back of your tongue 

‣ dabbling in witchcraft 

‣ thinking about Oscar Wilde 

‣ experiencing intense nostalgia but letting it consume you instead of pushing it away like you usually do 

‣ getting too involved in the classical music you’re listening to and feeling the crescendo in your soul  

‣ fantasizing

Why limit yourself between choosing a pretty feminine aesthetic or a dark one? If Persephone can be the Goddess of Spring and the Queen of the Underworld at the same time so can you.

yesterday my german teacher said "being a poet must be so eye opening but so constraining at the same time. you want to really see the world, but as soon as you do, you've had enough of it." and then he stared into nothing for a moment before shaking his head and continuing with the lesson? someone protect this man

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | We Should All Be Feminists | 2014

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. 

The Forest by Nikita Gill

This is fucking fantastic. The Edelweiss Pirates.

The Louvre // Lorde

Julius Grimm (1842-1906)

In 1888, Julius Grimm used photography and telescope observation to create this intricately detailed and precise oil painting of the moon. In the night sky, the moon is always lit from behind you – so the shadows of the craters can never appear as they do in this painting. Grimm instead regarded the moon as if it were a still life, bathed in golden light emanating from the left side of the painting. 

“The picture should only be hung or positioned, that the light falls onto the picture from the side where the arrow is positioned, because otherwise, in the case of incorrect lighting, the effect could be completely lost.”

A Thorn Amidst the Roses, 1887, by James Sant (1820-1916)