A Redistribution of Matter

Cubitum Eamus

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what is the secret history about?

it’s a cautionary tale about devoting yourself too much to The Aesthetic TM

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BRIGHT INTERROGATIVE TINA.

http://bigdumbtshblog.tumblr.com/post/110580675654/argentina-the-word-itself-had-lost-little-of-its

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Richard Papen: I am absolutely 100% heterosexual.

Everyone in the whole world: ok...that sounds fake..but ok

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Hey everyone!

So sorry I haven't updated recently. Family stuff and spotty Internet access have been making it difficult. Thanks so much for your continued support!

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I mean,' he said, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose, 'that strictly in terms of virulence there are any number of excellent poisons, most of them far superior to this. The woods will be soon full of foxglove and monkshood. I could get all the arsenic I needed from flypaper. And even herbs that aren't common here – good God, the Borgias would have wept to see the health-food store I found in Brattleboro last week. Hellebore, mandrake, pure oil of wormwood… I suppose people will buy anything if they think it's natural. The wormwood they were selling as organic insect repellent, as if that made it safer than the stuff at the supermarket. One bottle could have killed an army.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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My one year of pre-med had provided scanty knowledge at best, but the others, who knew nothing at all of medicine and regarded the discipline per se as less a science than a kind of sympathetic magic, constantly solicited my opinion on their aches and pains as respectfully as savages consulting a witch doctor. Their ignorance ranged from the touching to the downright shocking; Henry, I suppose because he'd been ill so often, knew more than the rest of them but occasionally even he would startle one with a perfectly serious question about humors or spleen.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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Richard just compared himself to Rimbaud.

Oh my GOD, Richard.

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Perhaps the oddest thing of all, though, I saw one afternoon when I'd hitched a ride into Hampden with Judy Poovey. I wanted to take some clothes to the cleaners and Judy, who was going into town, offered to drive me; we'd done our errands, not to mention an awful lot of cocaine in the parking lot of Burger King, and we were stopped in the Corvette at a red light, listening to terrible music ('Free Bird') on the Manchester radio station, and Judy rattling on, like the senseless cokehead she was, about these two guys she knew who'd had sex in the Food King ('Rightin the store! In the frozen food aisle!'), when she glanced out her window and laughed. 'Look,' she said. 'Isn't that your friend Four Eyes over there?'

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“The senseless cokehead she was“ RUDE, RICHARD. VERY RUDE. You don’t speak this way about people who drive you around and give you free drugs. What would Olivia Abernathy think.

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Religious slurs, temper tantrums, insults, coercion, debt: all petty things, really, irritants – too minor, it would seem, to move five reasonable people to murder. But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped to kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive. To ascribe it to such a motive would be easy enough. There was one, certainly. But the instinct for self-preservation is not so compelling an instinct as one might think.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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She was impervious to slights about her appearance; met his eye, unblinking, as he told the most vulgar and humiliating jokes; laughed if he attempted to insult her taste or her intelligence; ignored his frequent discourses, peppered with erudite quotations he must have gone to great trouble to dig up, all to the effect that all women were categorically inferior to himself: not designed as he was – for Philosophy, and Art, and Higher Reasoning, but to attract a husband and to Tend the Home.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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Things would have been terribly strange and unbalanced without her. She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King, and Joker.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not the fragile creature one would have her seem. In many ways she was as cool and competent as Henry; tough-minded and solitary in her habits, and in many ways as aloof.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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In fact, I can't think of much I'd like better than for him to step into the room right now, glasses fogged and smelling of damp wool, shaking the rain from his hair like an old dog and saying: 'Dickie, my boy, what you got for a thirsty old man to drink tonight?

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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Sometimes when I saw him at a distance – fists in pockets, whistling, bobbing along with his springy old walk – I would have a strong pang of affection mixed with regret. I forgave him, a hundred times over, and never on the basis of anything more than this: a look, a gesture, a certain tilt of his head.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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While I don't suppose that anyone who has devoted much energy to the study of Classics can be very much disturbed by homosexuality, neither am I particularly comfortable with it as it concerns me directly.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Yes these are definitely the words of a man 100% secure in his heterosexuality. JFC, Richard.