'nause

"why stop now, just when I'm hating it?"

[apocryphics]

[cosmicanger]

Barn Owl sculpture from ancient Egypt.

Late to Ptolemaic Period, 664–150 BC.

[glorianas]

You broke my heart, you killed me

WUTHERING HEIGHTS (2011)

[mosertone]

Walnut shells cut in half.

[letterful]

In Orwell’s essay “A Hanging,” the writer watches the condemned man, walking toward the gallows, swerve to avoid a puddle. For Orwell, this represents precisely what he calls the “mystery” of the life that is about to be taken: when there is no good reason for it, the condemned man is still thinking about keeping his shoes clean. It is an “irrelevant” act (and a marvelous bit of noticing on Orwell’s part). Now suppose this were not an essay but a piece of fiction. And indeed there has been a fair amount of speculation about the proportion of fact to fiction in such essays of Orwell’s. 

The avoidance of the puddle would be precisely the kind of superb detail that, say, Tolstoy might flourish; War and Peace has an execution scene very close in spirit to Orwell’s essay, and it may well be that Orwell basically cribbed the detail from Tolstoy. In War and Peace, Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight. The avoidance of the puddle, the fiddling with the blindfold—these are what might be called irrelevant or superfluous details. They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the “effects” of realism, of “realistic” style. 

But Orwell’s essay, assuming it records an actual occurrence, shows us that such fictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself (…) There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness. 

— JAMES WOOD, from How Fiction Works.

[letterful]

What exactly do these irrational standards mean? They mean the supremacy of the detail over the general, of the part that is more alive than the whole, of the little thing which a man observes and greets with a friendly nod of the spirit while the crowd around him is being driven by some common impulse to some common goal. I take my hat off to the hero who dashes into a burning house and saves his neighbor’s child; but I shake his hand if he has risked squandering a precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its favorite toy. I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles — no matter the imminent peril — these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.

— VLADIMIR NABOKOV, from Lectures on Literature.

[sorrrowfull]

[remythologise]

My father was Cunoval, bearer of the blue war-shield of the Brigantes. Lord of five hundred spears.

[john-silvers]

BLACK SAILS, XXXII

[john-silvers]

[artssie]

Somnambulant (1878) by Maximilián Pirner

[quitonly]

touch in EMMA. (2020)

[didanagy]

EMMA (2020)

dir. autumn de wilde

[thespoonisvictory]

Ursula K. Le Guin has truly, truly never missed even once

[nemfrog]

Fork lightning. The Romance of Modern Electricity. 1918.

Internet Archive

[resetme]

This is how they survive. You must know this. You're too smart not to know this. They paint the world full of shadows and then tell their children to stay close to the light. Their light. Their reasons, their judgments. Because in the darkness, there be dragons. But it isn't true. We can prove that it isn't true. In the dark, there is discovery. There is... possibility. There is freedom in the dark once someone has illuminated it. And who has been so close to doing it as we are right now?

BLACK SAILS 🏴‍☠️ January 25, 2014 - April 2, 2017.

[queennymeria]

[islamic-art-and-quotes]

Cemetery in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. Flickr