All I'm Saying Is That Sexy People Isolate Themselves From Everyone And Listen To Music, Read Books And

“And so being young and dipped in folly I fell in love with melancholy.” - Edgar Allen Poe

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 .

i know this isn’t really original but im obsessed with how english words that refer to the bodily, the tangible, the elemental etc are so often of anglo-saxon/germanic origin e.g. (heart, blood, jaw, flesh) or observable phenomena, like adjectives describing light (glisten, gloaming, glitter, gleam, gloom, glow, dark, fire) or places (hearth, hall, hill), and the most stark, primal emotions or states (hate, love, life, lust, death) and of course fuck, shit, bitch, cunt etc– these often monosyllabic, consonant heavy words…and then you have the lilting, limpid romance/latinate, words like acquiesce and exacerbate and agrarian and pellucid and clemency and lucidity…and how maybe the secret of all great english language poetry is a textural balancing of the push-pull of the germanic and the romantic/latinate, a balancing of these two energies. like some of the most powerful moments in shakespeare are where the verbosity falls away and you have these plain utterances (“to be or not to be” or lear’s dying “look there look there”– all anglo saxon words) that are so powerful precisely because the language is so ornate elsewhere. i once came up with an elaborate wildly incoherent theory about this in the pub with some drunk american masters student who was dressed like harry styles

Drawing by R.E. Higgins, 1923

Alt j: OH GOD I WANNA FUCK ANNE BOLEYN SO FUCKING MUCH!!!! HOLY SHIT I WANNA FUCK ANNE BOLEYN!!!!!!!

Me:

how can you even be a woman without going absolutely batshit insane

Franny Choi, Soft Science

LUCILLE CLIFTON

“I have always felt that mathematics is a language like music. To learn it systematically, it is necessary to master small pieces and gradually add another piece and then another. In a sense, mathematics is like the classical Chinese language—very polished and very elegant. Sitting in a good mathematics lecture is like sitting in good opera. Everything comes together.”

— Sun-Yung Alice Chang

Ana Sanchez - Death and the Maiden