death saith, "et in pulcritudo ego." @ephoectique - Tumblr Blog

By Small and Small: Midnight to Four A.M.

by Jack Gilbert

For eleven years I have regretted it, regretted that I did not do what I wanted to do as I sat there those four hours watching her die. I wanted to crawl in among the machinery and hold her in my arms, knowing the elementary, leftover bit of her mind would dimly recognize it was me carrying her to where she was going.

#one more for the “poems that gave me panic attacks” pile #it grows slowly but steadily

philomaela

Vallier and Simon in Les Feluettes (1996) dir. John Greyson

velvetcloak

zuhair murad | spring-summer 2026 paris

showings

The real difference between God and human beings, he thought, was that God cannot stand continuance. No sooner had he created a season of a year, or a time of the day, than he wishes for something quite different, and sweeps it all away. No sooner was one a young man, and happy at that, than the nature of things would rush one into marriage, martyrdom, or old age. And human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment face, and are up against a force majeure. Their art is nothing but the attempt to catch by all means the one particular moment, one mood, one light, the momentary beauty of one woman or one flower, and make it everlasting. It is all wrong, he thought, to imagine paradise as a never-changing state of bliss. It will probably, on the contrary, turn out to be, in the true spirit of God, an incessant up and down, a whirlpool of change. Only you may yourself, by that time, have become one with God, and have taken a liking to it.

Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), “The Monkey” | Seven Gothic Tales

belacqui-pro-quo

“Admittedly, the story of Oedipus does not seem to deal with the human at all; rather, it seems to present man with an inhuman choice. Either everything happens by chance and nothing is intelligible, or nothing happens by chance and everything is intelligible, but with this proviso: the possibility of discovering the pattern is remote, for it too depends on chance, and the pattern once discovered is sure to make life unlivable. There are either no gods or gods whose graciousness solely consists in guaranteeing that we shall never find out that they exist.”

— Seth Benardete, “On Greek Tragedy”

princesskuragina

When a relationship is "like family" but in a bad way. "Like family" in the sense that it becomes the only allowable place to seek care. In that it legitimizes the isolation and violence of an us-vs-them mentality. In that it creates hierarchical power structures and conditions where abuse and control are both easily rationalized and near impossible to break out of. Where the only way to escape your subjugation is to stop being the child and become the parent, starting the cycle anew. And this is both expected and encouraged. Where you feel obligated to repay your caretaker by becoming the kind of person they want you to be. Where everyone looks a little too much like you.

thirdity

“I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. […] Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied.”

— Louise Glück, Proofs and Theories