“The Fault In Our Death Stars”

Battle of tastes

What book (Out of ALL!) has the best opening lines?

What is Reckless?

Tumblr’s prodigal son returns to his audience of one--himself.

The past four or five years I’ve been consumed by ideas. Articulations. Unraveling mysteries.

But what kind of a mystery is something that can be articulated or unraveled? Very low quality.

Prose and poetry and music feel a little bit like things of another elevated reality. Such a place it must be, where those irresistible people live from myths and novels, such muses there must be to inspire some of the melodies out there.

So, where I can articulate something, or explicitly understand meaning, there I must break myself. And through the mystery, can one only reach anything worth reaching.

...one day you love them and the next day you want to kill them a thousand times over.

What a mystery, this world…

Discipline is Hard but Weakness is not my Game

I’ve been feeling waves of regression washing over me recently but at the same time I’ve been leaning forward. My ambitions, exuberant and overwhelming, have been leading me. And, again, I’m arrested in a state of complete antinomy: I’m satisfied and dissatisfied, hopeful and disillusioned--I feel these over the same things.

Leaping toward the shimmering notion of how I think I ought to be is what I’m trying to do, yet there’s this unbearable inertia in my life. If I say I want to write, I find I should throw away people, or care considerably less. In my constant struggle for creating something noteworthy I encounter discouragement. Well, on the heartfelt occasions. Of course I get the you’re great and the it’ll be fine but what are those supposed to mean? Not even the ones closest to me think of my writing as a tangible thing with tangible effects. For my environment it’s no more than a dream I’m sometimes having. Certainly romantic but not to be pursued to the damage of even the smallest thing.

I often wonder if the world’s as small as some people see it. Do I need a small job in order to this and that? Well, I refuse the necessity of it and always have. The start of a career or a seed-like job is a different case but I’m regularly pressured toward being practical the ordinary way and I see that as derogatory. I do encourage some folks to master base skills and unromantic professions and I am not against the concept of these, only I feel they get the wrong animal with me. I can’t do all that other people can but I have a strong conviction that I can excel, even create new frontiers, where our race seldom goes: the abstract, the grand and often vain projects that frighten so many. I crave those paths but I get the feeling that with it I frighten those, who love me.

Yet, after all, on a few days I too wake up with doubt. I despise doubt and loathe it, along with cowardice and ignorance but, much like the next person, I’m susceptible to all of those. Sometimes I read back what I’ve written and I’m disappointed. Then, of course, I get down to the part of grinding and go over it once again, until I can accept it but the next day it’s exactly the same amount of disappointment over yesterday’s promising new words. The temptation is unceasing, the beating inside me is counter-driving my soul, into disbelief and the will to abandon my work. But then it’s the universal beating of all ages and if anyone ever amounted to greatness, it’s no more than walking without letting herself be broken. We don’t need anyone for that--to break us. We are very efficient at giving terrible advice to ourselves, although it’s true that the world around us lavishes it at us without limit.

Similarly, in my emotions I’m conflicted. There are things that I want and there are people I want. My desires are sharply defined, there’s no need there, but I regret to want them. There’s no smart way around this though. Truthfully I don’t even know the objects of my desires thoroughly, yet if I were made to choose I would throw away all I have to have those. I think it would be painful but it wouldn’t take me more than a moment of having to contain whatever is trying to get out through our throats, when we feel profound loss, then I’d be immersed in the crisp breeze. I am certain I have the capacity to be like that only I know it’s wrong. It’s immoral and unwise, yet the demands of the soul of a man, who’s otherwise consciously fighting to reach his other desires, called ambitions, are hard to put away.

My desires resist and pull me. Whichever is to be attained is painful, and the ones that I denounce, will not leave me. Everything’s hard--said the poet.

“The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1,5-9

Do not speak unless you can improve upon the silence.

Quaker saying (via austinkleon)

(actually it’s a communication principle based on Kant’s maxims but yeah, way to go)

this guy... still hilarious and still helps a lot when it comes down to survival

10 THINGS YOU MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Brilliant, interesting and heartbrakingly familiar...

that’s about humanity’s dignity