Latest Posts by ad-meliora-tendo - Page 6

Armand Point, detail, Portrait de Madame Berthelot, 1895.

GOTHIC POETRY RECOMMENDATIONS

Edgar Allan Poe : The Complete Collection of Poems

Emily Brontë : The Complete Collection of Poems

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow : “Haunted Houses”

Dana Levin :  “ Styx”

William Blake : “ The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”  /  “A Divine Image”

Margaret Atwood :  “Mushrooms” 

Jorge Luis Borges : “Two English Poems”

Frank Bidart :  “The Ghost”

María Negroni :  “Rosamundi“

Anne Carson :  “The Glass Essay”

Emily Dickinson : The Complete Collection of Poems

Jericho Brown :  “Dear Dr. Frankenstein”

Sylvia Plath : “ Lady Lazarus” /  “Ariel” /  “Fever 103°”

Hughes Mearns :  “Antigonish [I met a man who wasn’t there]”

Robert Lowell : “Florence”

Gregory Orr :  “Gathering the Bones Together“

Paisley Rekdal :  “Bats”

“O human race, born to fly upward, wherefore at a little wind dost thou so fall?”

— Dante Alighieri, from “The Divine Comedy”, published p. 1472

My art history teacher is like "there were ZERO women artists during the renaissance well there was Sofonisba but that's it" and I'm STEAMING bc there WERE more female artists during the Renaissance and I KNOW this bc I spent hours researching women artists in the Renaissance so I could figure out what to name my girl ninja turtle oc when I was 11

“Hence I sit fearless on my goat, My naked charms displaying.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from “Faust I”, published p. 1808.

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”

— William Shakespeare, from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream“, published p. 1596

LITERATURE : WHERE TO START ? | MASTERPOST

dark academia, once again

an aesthetic that is inspired by old and classic literature/philosophy, as well as themes of existentialism and death. it revolves around a dark color scheme as the name implies, with hints of earthy tones as well, such as navy green, burgundy, cream, and brown/beige. this whole aesthetic is about looking like a wise-cracking, pretentious scholar, so you'd usually see one wearing plaid or suede dress pants, knitted turtlenecks, black belts, blazers, baggy overcoats, dress shoes/black heels, and pocket watches/gold vintage watches. you will occasionally find one lounging around in a used bookstore, reading old classics and writing poetry, or in a vintage coffee shop, ordering a black coffee or a green tea with no sugar.

sometimes i can’t believe how dreamy this city is! ✨🌙

you know what i want? a friend group in which everyone has read plato , aristotle and the secret history by donna tartt or has at least watched dead poets society and loves literature, poetry , philosophy , art and we can just talk about all these and our fear of academic failure . a friend group in which we can read classics together and talk about the deeper meaning of life and rant about how much of a failure this society is . i want to share my passion for life and writing and all the things i mentioned with someone that will be equally as excited as i am .

ron hick's paintings

young and beautiful by lana del rey plays and I'm immediately seized by the desire to dress in a glorious suit and stare out the window longingly at my unrequited love who lives across the bay. who will never be with me.

comprehensive list of books that will make you think a lot

at the request of @uglydumbbitchdotcom and @dreamingmappist (just to let you know, most of this is european and pre-1930 so if you're looking for literature from other continents this is not the list to go to. i wish i knew more about african, asian, and latin american literature, but alas - i do not.)

a portrait of the artist as a young man and dubliners: short stories of a city by james joyce

anything by fyodor dostoevsky (specifically crime and punishment, demons, notes from underground, but really anything will do and i'm not going to list his complete works on here)

the goldfinch and the secret history by donna tartt

frankenstein by mary shelley

fathers and sons by ivan turgenev

station eleven by emily st. john mandel

the death of ivan ilyich by leo tolstoy

in the first circle by aleksandr solzhenitsyn

paradise lost and paradise regained by john milton

till we have faces and that hideous strength by c.s. lewis

ninety-three and the man who laughs by victor hugo

faust, pt. 1 by goethe

the ulster cycle and an táin bó cúailnge

the a wrinkle in time quartet by madeleine l'engle

grace by paul lynch (this might be sort of an odd addition but he's one of the authors who follows in the joyce tradition and this is a beautiful book with a fascinating plot set during the great hunger so it deserves a place here)

a streetcar named desire by tennessee williams

the plough and the stars by sean o'casey

the grapes of wrath by john steinbeck

common sense by thomas paine

macbeth and henry v by william shakespeare

a room of one's own by virginia woolf

beowulf

say nothing by patrick radden keefe

one hundred years of solitude and the general in his labyrinth by gabriel garcia marquez

the underground railroad by william still

the letters of vincent van gogh

my god, there is a lot of russian literature on there. anyway, here are the books that made me think the most and hardest out of anything i've read

“epilogue”

he so fevently dreamed

aged and decrepit

shaking

in the building

flooded with moonlight

he no longer forced praise

and could not

sever ties with

the only connection

to

black-bordered death

a flood of painful memories

roaring

and

beautiful

Mercy never existed

reality never existed

he

just dreamed it all under the influence

a blackout poem made using a page taken from The Master and Margarita. Kind of reminded me of the time Richard almost froze himself to death in the mandolin factory because he was too scared to tell anyone that he had nowhere to stay during break.

A romantic is a person who believes in romanticism, which is like a philosophy on life. 

Romantics love nature, old things like castles and churches, love poetry and beauty, and have a tendency to get carried away by ideas. This can be both bad and good, as most of the original romantics stood up for their beliefs and greatly helped England, but also went to help people in revolutions and got killed. 

They also tend to get randomly depressed, but this is because the weather and colors and beatiful things make them act differently than others.

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

You’re busy doubting yourself while so many people are intimidated by your potential

The sheer beauty of being truly invested in a book is what I live for. Your eyes fervishly scan the words desperate to know what happens next. You feel the characters and it’s like they’re an extension of you. Every word, every letter is deeply ingrained as it becomes a part of you

dark academia is:

the secrets of life hidden in the vastness of the universe

finding the special moments amongst the silence in the library and in the velvet pressed against your cheek

feel the blood course through your veins

carrying adrenaline with every turn of events

empty mugs of better black coffee

cutting their hair and painting angels during their free time

androgynous scholars with a fascination for the mystic and philosophers from ancient times

why is that so heartbreaking

“I read a passage in an ancient poem, and I seem to understand my own heart.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’

“it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days.”

Oscar Wilde to lover Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, January 1893

i really like being pretentious and all but what i actually like even more is that i'm genuinely so invested in this hunt for knowledge that i'm on. like,,,, i do wanna know every work of shakespeare by heart and i do wanna read the night away draped over second hand philosophy books and a worn out volume of the illiad and i do wanna quote french poetry and oscar wilde at social events and i wanna be what history would call an intellectual and i wanna live and breathe these things i care about because i have a deep and consuming passion for them and i want to be as immersed in them as possible.

how to stop endlessly analyzing your own behavior as if you were a scientific experiment

you don’t need to go to a prestigious university or an exclusive boarding school to get dark academia vibes. you can be a pretentious brooding scholar at your local public high school as well. leave books on renaissance paintings and ancient rituals open on library desks. write ominous notes in the margins of textbooks. quote byron on the bathroom stall door. wear an unmistakable scent of perfume, so when you enter a classroom, everyone knows that you’ve arrived. cut your hair in the sink of the science lab. slip roses into random lockers. surround yourself with a few number of close friends and form your own secret circle. gain a reputation. have whispers follow you down the hallways. I would, however, advise against murder.

“Why are some people drawn to minimalist architecture and others to Baroque? Why are some people excited by bare concrete walls and others by William Morris’s floral patterns? Our tastes will depend on what spectrum of our emotional make-up lies in shadow and is hence in need of stimulation and emphasis. Every work of art is imbued with a particular psychological and moral atmosphere: a painting may be either serene or restless, bourgeois or aristocratic, and our preferences for one kind over another reflect our varied psychological gaps. We hunger for artworks that will compensate for our inner fragilities and help return us to a viable mean. We call a work ‘beautiful’ when it supplies the virtues we are missing, and we dismiss as ‘ugly’ one that forces on us moods or motifs that we feel either threatened or already overwhelmed by. Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.”

— Alain de Botton & John Armstong, Art as Therapy

How to Save Your Own Life, Erica Jong

Any quotes which make you shudder?

GLAD YOU ASKED:

“I’m sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.” —Richard Siken from “Little Beast”“You happened to me. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.”—Marilyn Hacker from “Nearly a Valediction”“I don’t want to be around you. I don’t want to drink you in. I want to walk into the heart of you and never walk back out. “—Nico Alvarado from “Tim Riggins Speaks of Waterfalls”“Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers.”—Margaret Atwood from “The Good Bones”“When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life, in each place and forever.”—Bob Hicok from “Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem”“When I haven’t been kissed in a long time, I create civil disturbances, then insult the cops who show up, till one of them grabs me by the collar and hurls me up against the squad car, so I can remember, at least for a moment, what it’s like to be touched.”—Jeffrey McDaniel, “When a Man Hasn’t Been Kissed”“Kiss the mouth which tells you, here,here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.”—Galway Kinnell from “Little Sleep’s Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight”“I will love you forever; whatever happens. Until I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, until I find you again.”—Phillip Pullman from “The Amber Spyglass”“I wanted to write ‘stay’ on your sides,surround your bed with oceans of salt.I hope he folds you into a fox, loves you like a splintered arrow, brandishes the kill of your lips. May the bouquet of your hips wither. May the wolves forget your name.”—J. Bradley“I love you. If you hadn’t existed I would have had to invent you.”–Elaine Dundy from “The Dud Avocado”“And I’d choose you; in a hundred different lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you.”—Kiersten White“The first time I asked you on a date, after you hung up, I held the air between our phones against my ear and whispered, ‘You will fall in love with me. Then, just months later, you will fall out. I will pretend the entire time that I don’t know it’s coming.’”—Miles Walser “I will come back from the dead for you.”—Richard Siken from “You Are Jeff”“Do you want it? Do you want anything I have? Will you throw me to the ground like you mean it, reach inside and wrestle it out with your bare hands? If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.”—Richard Siken from “Wishbone”“Here we are, at the place where I get to beg for it. Where I get to say ‘Please,for just one night, will you lay down next to me? We can leave our clothes on,we can stay all buttoned up?’ But we both know how it goes–– I say I want you inside me and you hold my head underwater. I say I want you inside me and you split me open with a knife.”—Richard Siken from “Wishbone”“Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the Earth like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.”—Jeffrey McDaniel

— James Elkins, Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings

booty shorts with “does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? i used to think it didn't. now I think it does. and i think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs” on the ass

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