La Collectionneuse

existentialist | she/her | reader

[beljar]

beljar

This blog is a public display of artworks and literary texts inspired by my readings.

welcoming recommendations and web weaving requests

- Tags -

⚡️Web Weavings

♠️ Letters

⚡️Waves

⚡️Artworks

♠️ Yellow // Green // Blue // Orange // Red

♠️ Genesi

♠️ Photography

~ Black & White

♠️ Illustrations

⚡️On Palestine

⚡️Quotes

♠️ Alienation // Kafkaeque // Existentialism // longings // Isolation // Death

♠️ Portuguese Literature

side blog: @parthenop

[beljar]

I was living in a villa in the suburbs, alone with a dog, a couple of cats and their kittens, all black. The mother cat could not feed them. One by one, all the kittens died. They filled the room with their filth. Every evening, when I arrived home, I would find one lying stiff, its gums laid bare. One evening, I found the last one, half eaten by the mother. It stank already. The stench of death mingled with the stench of urine. Then, with my hands in the filth and the stench of rotting flesh reeking in my nostrils, I sat down in the midst of all this misery and gazed for hour after hour at the demented glow in the cat’s green eyes as it crouched motionless in the corner. Yes. And it is just like that this evening. When we are stripped down to a certain point, nothing leads anywhere any more, hope and despair are equally groundless, and the whole of life can be summed up in an image.

Albert Camus, "Between Yes and No" from Lyrical and critical essays, 1968

[beljar]

The current's tale by Haranikala

[beljar]

Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.

Umberto Eco, from The Name of the Rose, 1980

[beljar]

Because what is the face, what finally, is the skin over the flesh, a cover, a disguise, rouge for the insupportable horror of our living nature.

Elena Ferrante, from The Days of Abandonment, 2002

[beljar]

But what if death doesn't want you either, what if death just turns it's back on you like everything else... death just doesn't... doesn't want to come!

Sadegh Hedayat, from Buried Alive, 1930

[beljar]

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, January 14, 1963

[beljar]

The mother instinct is something of which I am completely devoid. I explain it like this to myself: life is a vale of tears and all human beings are miserable creatures, so I cannot take the responsibility for bringing yet another unhappy creature into the world.

Etty Hillesum, from An Interrupted Life: Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum [1941-43]

[parthenop]

Sign the petition! Support the South African case charging Israel with genocide in the World Court

We Charge Genocide - Support the South African case charging Israel with genocide

Join me in supporting South Africa’s case charging Israel with genocide and urge the Biden administration to stop undermining the internatio

[beljar]

Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.

Gustave Flaubert, from November, 1842

[beljar]

Once they have slept together they will have to find something else to veil the enormous absurdity of their existence.

Jean-Paul Sartre, from Nausea, 1938

[beljar]

A feeling, a sense of attachment? Do you know? Has it got a name? What do you call it? Is it normal? Should I be worried?

I’ve got nothing against death. Nothing against rotting away. What frightens me is what doesn’t die and never changes form.

I like to be in the room. I find it very erotic. The suspended object, I recognise my gender in it.. Every time I look at the object, I can feel my sex between my legs and between my lips. I become moist, regardless of whether I’ve got anything there or not.

The fragrance in the room has will and intention. It’s the smell of something old and decomposing, something musty. It’s as if the smell wishes to initiate the same process in me: that I become a branch to break off, rot and be gone.

You want to know why I like the incinerator? It’s the smell of burnt matter, it reminds me of mealtimes at home. The smell of meat and soil and blood. It smells of the birth of my daughter. It smells of Planet Earth.

Olga Ravn, from The Employees: A workplace Novel of the 22nd Century, [Translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken]

[beljar]

If I had had the power to prevent my own birth I should certainly never have consented to accept existence under such ridiculous conditions.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, from The Idiot, 1869

[beljar]

Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.

Hermann Hesse, from Steppenwolf, 1927

[beljar]

The fragrance in the room has four hearts. None of these hearts is human, and that’s why I’m drawn towards them.

Olga Ravn, from The Employees: A workplace Novel of the 22nd Century, (statement 011) [Translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken]

[beljar]

Freud writes that mourning and melancholia share the same features: a “profoundly painful depression, a loss of interest in the outside world, the loss of the ability to love, the inhibition of any kind of performance.” In both melancholia and mourning, the sufferer grieves the loss of a loved object.

Cynthia Cruz, from 'The Melancholia of Class'

[beljar]

Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.

Marguerite Duras, from Writing, 1993