Never stop pushing for more. If you sleep 8 hours a day, go for 10, or 12 or maybe 16. Never settle for less.

every time u steal from a large corporation a small business gets its wings

I'm the cat 🐙 but Lovecraftian

Mood

To know you grew up. To know you have grown up and will continue growing up to be older than them, than him. It was comfortable knowing that the world might end at seventeen. But now you're older, older than that. Older than the comfort characters you thought you fit in with... It's a subtle, bittersweet ache in my chest. I'm happy, but also sad. I want to cry, but also laugh.

I feel genuinely sorry for the Richards who enjoy Dark Academia bc all the most important characters in DA are named Richard and all of them are a POS

the academic urge to run away in the woods once the realisation of exams approaching hits 

“you will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.” is such a poignant line you’d think it came from a naruto fanfic but it’s actually from oscar wilde’s the picture of dorian gray

If this isn't one of the greatest debuts to a tumblr blog lmfao

Credit-rightpoetry on pinterest

Found this on insta and somehow its too relatable

he's a 10 but he has a cursed rotting portrait of himself which shows the decaying of his soul which he traded for eternal youth and beauty

Hi, I'm the ghost...

The Secret History out of context:

Richard repairing mandolins

Richard cutting his hair with nail scissors

Bunny vomiting in a broom closet

Francis and Charles banging at their friend's funeral

Charles sleeping in a giant pink snail

Richard and Francis choosing the perfect flower for Charles

Charles in tears totally touched by their choose

Some images of me through the day.

You know, one thing that really bothers me about how people view Bunny and the whole point of The Secret History is that they seem to think that because Richard is an unreliable narrator, that makes him a complete liar and everything that he says happened to and with Bunny was completely twisted into portraying him as bad as Richard can to justify Bunny's murder.

Although that's truth to some extent, I refuse to believe everything about their interactions is a lie, because that would be just lazy writing to justify things you don't want to think about very hard instead of really putting an effort into explaining the open ends to your reader. And I don't believe Donna Tartt is this kind of writer.

Anyway, I saw a post here on tumblr where op says that Bunny is the person that connected the rest of the group to ground reality and that's why his death is so tragic. Even agreeing with this person, I have some thoughts I still want to vent to you guys.

The point of TSH is that knowledge just for aesthetics is dangerous, but that's the thing: our characters have so much knowledge and they are still absolute idiots because they don't see their knowledge through the lens of reality. Their knowledge has no material grounds and therefore, it doesn't even occur to them to be aware of the things they are ignorant about because our minds have trouble understanding how much we don't understand.

(Which is ironic, considering Ancient Greece were the very first Occidental civilization to bring the notion of ignorance to the conversation, but anyways...)

But my point is, as much as Bunny is their link to their humanity, it's not like the humanity Bunny shows is anywhere near the kind of humanity they should be craving, sorry not sorry. From their very first interaction, I hated Bunny because although he's human in his rawest form, he's also just as ignorant as the rest of the group, just in a different way. My problem with Bunny as he's portrayed even early on is that he prides himself on his own ignorance and that, in my personal values, is way more worrisome then not understand how much you don't know.

Because the second case still has space to grow, to learn — albeit with mighty hardship, as exemplified by the very story — and the first one (Bunny's ignorance) is just stasis. And humans don't thrive through inaction, it's just not how we're wired. We are our best version when we're acting to be better — you can perceive this in Bell Hook's All About Love (Chapter 4), in psychology (my therapist has almost emphasize the need to act on my emotions instead of just feeling it and be locked up on them), Theodore Roosevelt has a speech about it too (the man in the arena).

So when I look at Bunny's character through the critical thinking of Richard being an unreliable narrator, it's still inconceivable to me to see him as some people do and be sad about his murder like he didn't deserve to die. Now let's be clear: he didn't deserve to die but it's not like the world is a worst place because of his death. Bunny is insufferable, entitled (although not because of the reasons Henry and the other point out later in the story to justify his murder), bigoted and overall just the epitome of a middle-class American white man (which to me is his worst characteristic), and his death is not that tragic in the overall sense.

His death is tragic because it brings the rest of the group back to reality, where what they do has weight and consequences. And don't even get me started on Julian and how much I hate his ass because it was his responsibility to provide these young adults with an education that was at the very least, grounded in reality. And let me be clear, when I say "grounded in reality" I don't mean common sense. He could still reflect upon Beauty and Terror and all of the stuff he wanted. The problem is that there's a why. We don't study things (specially not philosophy) in a vacuum, the things we do study are real, palpable, material. It has grounds in reality because science, Social Science in special, is about the truth of reality and how it's viewer and how it shapes our very foundations as individuals and as society.

But I digress, I'll do a commentary on Julian and his teaching methods later on.

So in a sense, Bunny's death was tragic because he was the anchor, even in death, of a reality none of the characters wanted to face. A reality that isn't pretty, nor it is good. So Bunny is not good, he was never good. He was just real. He was a real human being and he lived in the world the rest of the group avoided in a mistaken sense of arrogance, of being above "all that". And that's charming, but it doesn't mean Bunny represent anything near the kind of reality we should aim to live in.

Bunny, just like the others, was ignorant and arrogant about it. But as I said, he prided himself on his ignorance. He studied because he was killing time until he was ready to do something else, something he thought was the "real" thing. And that's just as dangerous, or even more so in a collective sense, than not being aware of our own ignorance.

To deny knowledge and the importance of it, to deny all there is behind the aesthetic, not because you don't see it but because you don't want to see it, is just as dumb as just seeing the looks and thinking there's nothing more to it. And in a collective sense, it's just as harmful. The reality he represents is a reality without knowledge, it's studying and not absorbing anything, not even the aesthetic. The one thing that makes me hate the rest of the group a bit less than I hate Bunny is that they at the very least allow themselves to be influenced by knowledge, although in a idiotic way. And that's not even completely their fault.

Bunny, on the other hand, is just, stasis. He's the same person throughout it all, and based on his family and his general behaviour? He could've been an okay person (the kind you tolerate in family dinners because it's not worth the drama), but he was very far from being a good person because to be a good person requires action, it requires the very knowledge he despises — because if you act without knowledge, you're just as blind as any ignorant (that's why we study).

So I don't get why people get so invested in defending Bunny because his death was just as meaningless as his life would've been. And I get that that sounds mean, but it's true exactly because Bunny's whole thing is his own brand of ignorance is inaction and no one changes doing nothing.