existentialistes

you can feel the poetry rotting in your stomach

[existentialistes]

Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal: The Living Torch

[existentialistes]

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

[existentialistes]

my favourite part of making a typography post that becomes popular is seeing the tags people add. like we all read the same words so differently depending on our lives, identities, experiences!! i feel like a pedestrian on a street lined with houses catching brief glimpses into the lives happening inside each one.

[existentialistes]

[existentialistes]

[existentialistes]

the hopeless dream of being

Sylvia Plath “the bell jar”, Ingmar Bergman’s “persona” (1966), Margaret Atwood “the handmaid’s tale”.

[alempalavra]

Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

[existentialistes]

”If you’ve ever seen a real dead body you know that people never die with such complacent grins, such blankness. But I used their plaster casts as a guide and practiced very diligently in the mirror, relaxing my face while keeping an aura of benign resilience, such as I saw in those dead men’s faces. I mention it because it is the face I wore at work, my death mask. Being as young as I was, I was terribly sensitive, and determined never to show it. I steeled myself from the reality of the place.”

Ottessa Moshfegh. ”Eileen”.

[existentialistes]

”I hoped they saw right through my death mask to my sad and fiery soul, though I doubt they saw me at all.”

Ottessa Moshfegh. ”Eileen”

[existentialistes]

my year of rest and relaxation / ottessa moshfegh 

[parkchanwoohoo]

“Sorry I don’t want to spend my precious free time reading a 400 page Russian novel about depression”

“Film bros when you tell them you like having fun instead of watching a 1923 Greek film about divorce”

Okay so like I’ve already talked extensively about people who say this shit are largely shadowboxing against their insecurities about not having what they perceive to be elevated tastes rather than addressing any meaningful “gatekeeping” in the broad realm of media consumption as a whole, so rather than that I’d like to ask why everyone who says shit like this feels a need to emphasize the foreignness of a particular work as another aspect of how undesirable it is to engage with.

Like obviously these people are not literally saying “lmao I’d NEVER read a Russian/Greek/whatever book” but once you start noticing this you start seeing it everywhere and idk man! Not a fan

[valiumvenus]

it’s cuz they think that any non-US media is niche & obscure and somehow must be an acquired taste

[renegade-hierophant-deactivated]

Color-coding Ancient Greek grammar with translation.

Sentences from A Greek Reader by Frederic Jacobs, London, 1844.

The advantage of learning a language with a long history of being taught is that you can find good textbooks that are centuries old.

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

However well phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural–if the objects and yourself is separate–then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit.

Matsuo Bashō, from The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Penguin Books, 1966)

[existentialistes]

Adonis, from Selected Poems; The Wound

[katachthonia]

Allen Ginsberg, from Howl and Other Poems; “Song”

[existentialistes]

Adonis, from Selected Poems; To a Soothsayer

[replicated-archive]

when camus said the literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself

[existentialistes]

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