Is there, in truth, no beauty?

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

"They sat in the colonnade in the dying afternoon, with the sun glinting downward toward the mist-purpled jags of the horizon and the air so heavy with the scent of growing things that its motions were merely sighs of exertion."

Isaac Asimov, Pebble in the Sky

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

1914, sir. War is coming. In foreign fields, war of the whole wide world, with all your boys falling down in the mud. Do you think they will thank the man who taught them it was glorious?

Baines/Son of Mine, Doctor Who, "The Family of Blood"

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

And you to whom adversity has dealt the final blow, With smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go, Turn to and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

from The Mary Ellen Carter, Stan Rogers

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

You're not friends. You'll never be friends. You'll be in love 'til it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate each other 'til it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends. Love isn't brains, children, it's blood, blood screaming within you to work its will. I may be love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it.

Spike, from Lovers Walk, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

[T]here are times when suddenly you realize you're nearer the end than the beginning. And you wonder, you ask yourself, what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything.

Col. Nicholson, Bridge on the River Kwai

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

There was real fear mixed up in his love, and the precipitate from the mixing of these two is cruelty.

[intactics-deactivated20211231]

I am asking you to endure it.

[intactics-deactivated20211231]

a lot of Gregory Berrycones in the notes missing the reference to my twelve note magnum opus from several hours prior in which the narrator silently begs an entity that isn’t really God for death and the entity says no

[intactics-deactivated20211231]

the narrator is operating under the constraint that they can only use words “god” has already spoken, “god” is aware of this and says the ‘Time flies’ sentence on purpose in order to give the narrator the pieces they need to voice their complaint; “god” has constant access to the narrator’s thoughts, and answers them as though they’re having a conversation between equals, but clearly absolutely dictates the terms under which the narrator can speak. it becomes obvious as the scene continues that the narrator is silently screaming and that the request being denied may be a request for death, but is at minimum a request for some acute suffering to be stopped

this could be an interaction between a normal person and an evil telepath with some mind control ability pretending to be the voice of a benevolent god. or it could work as a demon lord speaking to a soul they’ve trapped in a mirror and keep at their side. or it could be an actual god trying to calm down their only believer because they’re trapped in the same prison. the concept amused me so kindly forgive the ugliness of the execution

[zindabad]

you are asking me to endure it

[my-urdu-soul]

by Akhil Katyal

[macrolit]

“Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte’s life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like an assiduous housekeeper locking up a rambling mansion, it noiselessly went about and turned off, one by one, the mind’s thousand small accesses to pleasure.”

— Charlotte Gray, Sebastian Faulks (b. 20 April 1953)

[bitesizedpoetry]

What happened, happened once. So now it’s best

in memory—an orange he sliced: the skin

unbroken, then the knife, the chilled wedge

lifted to my mouth, his mouth, the thin

membrane between us, the exquisite orange,

tongue, orange, my nakedness and his,

the way he pushed me up against the fridge—

Now I get to feel his hands again, the kiss

that didn’t last, but sent some neural twin

flashing wildly through the cortex. Love’s

merciless, the way it travels in

and keeps emitting light. Beside the stove

we ate an orange. And there were purple flowers

on the table. And we still had hours.

Kim Addonizio, Stolen Moments

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

All our lives long, every day and every hour, we are engaged in the process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves to changed and unchanged surroundings: living, in fact, is nothing else than this process of accommodation; when we fail in it a little we are stupid, when flagrantly we are mad, when we suspend it temporarily we sleep, when we give up the attempt altogether we die.

from The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler

[naberiie]

WHAT is that one poem (?), abt a modern worker contemplating the numerous forgotten who were actually responsible for all the ‘great’ deeds of history

[naberiie]

found it!!

A Worker Reads History Bertolt Brecht

Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books are filled with names of kings. Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? And Babylon, so many times destroyed. Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima’s houses, That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it? In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song. Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend The night the seas rushed in, The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves. Young Alexander conquered India. He alone? Caesar beat the Gauls. Was there not even a cook in his army? Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears? Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War. Who triumphed with him? Each page a victory At whose expense the victory ball? Every ten years a great man, Who paid the piper? So many particulars. So many questions.

[violsva]

So I just went through three notebooks to find this, because I knew it was there.

I was at the ROM, about six years ago, at a special exhibit on Babylon. And there was a brick, formerly part of a palace. And Nebuchadnezzar, the one who built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, had had his name in cuneiform stamped on every single brick, to emphasize that he had built it.

And on this one, a workman had carved his own name, Zabina’, into the block too, in Aramaic. Here’s the brick. It’s 2600 years old.

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

Numbers do not lie. Politics, poetry, promises, these are lies, but numbers are as close as we get to the handwriting of God.

Gottlieb, Pacific Rim

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

Sonnet XXX

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolution's power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It well may be. I do not think I would.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

The straight, the swift, the debonair, Are targets on the thoroughfare For every kind appraising eye; Sweet words are said as they pass by. But such a strange contrary thing My heart is, it will never cling To any bright unblemished thing. Such have their own security, And little need to lean on me. The limb that falters on its course, And cries, "Not yet!" to waning force; The orb that may not brave the sun; The bitter mouth, its kissing done; The loving heart that must deny The very love it travels by; What most has need to bend and pray, These magnets draw my heart their way. 

 - “Magnets,” Countee Cullen

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

Sonnet XXX

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolution's power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It well may be. I do not think I would. - Edna St. Vincent Millay

[fatal-flaws-aflame]

Your soul mate is your complement, not your missing piece.

Garnet, Steven Universe Future