“The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.”

— Derek Walcott, Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series

“To be a philosopher, that is to say, a lover of wisdom (for wisdom is nothing but truth), it is not enough for a man to love truth, in so far as it is compatible with his own interest, with the will of his superiors, with the dogmas of the church, or with the prejudices and tastes of his contemporaries; so long as he rests content with this position, he is only a philautos [a lover of self], not a philosophos [a lover of wisdom].”

— Arthur Schopenhauer, “Sketch of a History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real”, Parerga and Paralipomena

“It was the duty of philosophy to destroy the illusions which had their origin in misconceptions, whatever darling hopes and valued expectations may be ruined by its explanations.”

— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

“Realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age.”

— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

you, a peasant: wild thoughts

me, a gay literature student: Wilde thots

I keep buying books because in the future I’m gonna have a kickass library with two floors and a fireplace so I need to start collecting books to fill it with

‘no need to hurry. no need to sparkle. no need to be anybody but oneself.’

virginia woolf, a room of one’s own

Manuscript of Bram Stoker’s Dracula playscript, from 1897.

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

i’m confused but wooo luck !

good things will happen 🧿

things that are meant to be will fall into place 🧿

“We are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.”

— Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

* Flaubert from Croisset to Turgenev on Jan. 21, 1880 Thank you for making me read Tolstoy's novel [''War and Peace''] . It's first-rate. What a painter and what a psychologist! The first two [volumes] are sublime; but the third goes terribly to pieces. He repeats himself and he philosophizes! In fact the man, the author, the Russian are visible, whereas up until then one had seen only Nature and Humanity. It seems to me that in places he has some elements of Shakespeare. I uttered cries of admiration during my reading of it . . . and it's long! Tell me about the author. Is it his first book? In any case he has his head well screwed on! Yes! It's very good! Very good!

* Turgenev from Paris to Flaubert on Jan. 24, 1880 You cannot imagine the pleasure your letter gave me and what you say about Tolstoy's novel. Your approval confirms my own ideas about him. Yes, he is a man of great talent, and yet you put your finger on the weak spot: he also has built himself a philosophical system, which is at one and the same time mystical, childish and presumptuous, and which has spoilt his third volume dreadfully, and the second novel that he wrote after ''War and Peace'' - and where there are also things of the first order. I don't know what the critics will say. (I have sent ''War and Peace'' to Daudet and Zola as well.) But for me the matter is settled: Flaubertus dixit. The rest is of no significance.

instagram.com/litrussa

a lost cause: part one

I closed my eyes, hoping that they would cease to open ever again, what was I to do at this point other than await a gloomy demise to my anticipating casket?

There I lay, on that bed of weepy sorrows and overflown aches, the birds chirp outside as they awake from their slumber, what is it that keeps them motivated? There is such a sadness to the morning, it seems to bring nothing but a gloomy glow over each and every inch of being that retains itself within that room, the room that held all the secrets of my misery, secrets that would never be heard by anyone, not until it became too late.

I wondered, perhaps too late, if there was a true purpose to my being there, in that room, with the trees aching in their eternal existence. It seemed rather ridiculous to me, maybe even cruel, that one is placed her without a morsel of knowledge on what their purpose may be, on what the meaning of their existence truly is. It does create the question, does anyone truly know? There was something about the air that morning, it flowed in on a bed of regret and pain as though to warn me of the upcoming disaster that would face me, one that I had become accustomed to, but had not yet accepted as tantamount to truth, what was the need for me to pay attention to an air so trivial and banal? It’s one that flowed over us day after day in this place, a place closed off from the rest of humanity, a place that sucks the soul of one person and hands it, heart to hand, to another. This cruelty was nothing a human was subjected to at birth, but then, what is our purpose? Perhaps, after all, this is the only reason I have truly been put here, for this purpose and this purpose alone, to be used and manipulated. But, isn’t there more to it? As a child you are fed all of these intricacies of life and how it could turn out; you become so fixated on those intricacies, those impossibilities, that they seem as though that, in your head, they could become a reality so strong that no one would dare apprehend you. But, it just doesn’t end that way, you become worn and forlorn, webbed with the deceit and lies that are fed to you, as you attempt to escape your entrapment. As I sat there I wondered to myself, as I had done so many times before, if I were to ask a wandering soul, ‘What is the propose of your existence?’ they would ultimately be toppled onto their heads, for the plain and simple fact being that, for most of their lives they had appeased themselves with an idea that their life had meaning, this came from their own self love, yet when faced with the question, an awful terror would flood them and they’d realise, the answer does not exist.

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.

- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey

a lost cause: part one

I closed my eyes, hoping that they would cease to open ever again, what was I to do at this point other than await a gloomy demise to my anticipating casket?

There I lay, on that bed of weepy sorrows and overflown aches, the birds chirp outside as they awake from their slumber, what is it that keeps them motivated? There is such a sadness to the morning, it seems to bring nothing but a gloomy glow over each and every inch of being that retains itself within that room, the room that held all the secrets of my misery, secrets that would never be heard by anyone, not until it became too late.

I wondered, perhaps too late, if there was a true purpose to my being there, in that room, with the trees aching in their eternal existence. It seemed rather ridiculous to me, maybe even cruel, that one is placed her without a morsel of knowledge on what their purpose may be, on what the meaning of their existence truly is. It does create the question, does anyone truly know? There was something about the air that morning, it flowed in on a bed of regret and pain as though to warn me of the upcoming disaster that would face me, one that I had become accustomed to, but had not yet accepted as tantamount to truth, what was the need for me to pay attention to an air so trivial and banal? It’s one that flowed over us day after day in this place, a place closed off from the rest of humanity, a place that sucks the soul of one person and hands it, heart to hand, to another. This cruelty was nothing a human was subjected to at birth, but then, what is our purpose? Perhaps, after all, this is the only reason I have truly been put here, for this purpose and this purpose alone, to be used and manipulated. But, isn’t there more to it? As a child you are fed all of these intricacies of life and how it could turn out; you become so fixated on those intricacies, those impossibilities, that they seem as though that, in your head, they could become a reality so strong that no one would dare apprehend you. But, it just doesn’t end that way, you become worn and forlorn, webbed with the deceit and lies that are fed to you, as you attempt to escape your entrapment. As I sat there I wondered to myself, as I had done so many times before, if I were to ask a wandering soul, ‘What is the propose of your existence?’ they would ultimately be toppled onto their heads, for the plain and simple fact being that, for most of their lives they had appeased themselves with an idea that their life had meaning, this came from their own self love, yet when faced with the question, an awful terror would flood them and they’d realise, the answer does not exist.