All over the place

Roman Catholic, Tolkien fan. You know what you're getting into.

[simena]

Henri Charles Antoine Baron (detail)

[tonreihe]

Flannery O’Connor’s bedtime reading: Thomas Aquinas. (Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor)

[llovinghome]

[simena]

Frank Weston Benson

[stealingpotatoes]

i don't know what older adults were on about when they said being a teenager was good <3

[francesderwent]

the impact that “dying is easy, young man, living is harder” has had. single-handedly undermined one of the last remaining bastions of Christian culture by making a traditional redemption arc ending in sacrifice seem alien and unattractive

[francesderwent]

@dimsilver & @freenarnian

what you've both said here, in "life lived for God and others: a thousand little deaths" and "to live is Christ", is actually exactly the root of my (admittedly offhandedly expressed) antipathy.

of course I am not making the claim that death is better than life; nothing could be further from the truth, nothing could be less Christian. I take issue with the statement that life is hard and death is easy. inasmuch as we're talking about something that is a struggle, we're talking about the little deaths that are present in this earthly life; the Scriptural description of the sacrificial life we are called to live as Christians casts what is difficult and sorrowful and sacrificial as death--dying to self, taking up the Cross (which is not merely the image of carrying a heavy load but carrying the instrument of execution!). and on other side, when we talk about something being easy, that implies to me the perfection of virtue: a nature fulfilling what it was made for so wholly that it's surpassed the point where it's difficult, and now it "comes naturally". we were made not for death but for life! and life is from and of God, and so true life is marked by being joyous and satisfying, communion-filled and peaceful, not a hard slog.

I think this distinction is hugely important because without it, it becomes impossible to recognize why martyrdom is a part of the history of the faith--and in fact, the form that all of us are called to imitate. everyday courage isn't opposed to martyrdom, they're in parallel to each other. we're not saying the little deaths are easy and inconsequential. of course not! if they were easy they wouldn't require us to die! rather, by dying our little deaths day by day, we grow in courage and humility enough that if we should ever be called to make the ultimate witness as a martyr, by the grace of God we would be able to, because we'd been practicing that same self-sacrificial death all along. and that jump, from daily sacrifice to ultimate sacrifice, is not a throwing out of life or a disregard of the value of life, because this life is not all there is. we were created for eternal life, and in specific circumstances a person shows their desire and love for Life by being willing to lose their life.

on the contrary, the "dying is easy, living is harder" statement implies within it both a sort of despairing disdain for life (alright, I guess I'll live, but it'll suck the whole time) as well as the non-existence of any life after death. the easy dying is portrayed as slipping passively away, unmoved by the world and all its beauty, into nothing worthwhile. it is this statement, actually, which gives greater weight to death by assuming death is a tempting siren calling to us. the martyr is not tempted by death, the martyr is so busy looking at Life that they can see beyond death--is so assured of Life that they can laugh at death! this paradox is an inescapable part of the teachings of Christ: "For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it"!!

don't get me wrong: the arrival of Christianity on the scene does force us to recognize the value of every individual human being, who should not be made merely a cog in the machinery of war or industry, heedlessly sacrificed to a cause not worthy of his life. in this way, Christianity moves beyond the pagan view. but the novelty of Christianity is also the possibility of giving one's life and having it not be a tragedy, because there is Life on the other side, and love too. giving your life for the gods would be a waste. giving your life for God, who loves you and has a place waiting for you, is the ultimate destiny of life. I think the problem with the way tumblr utilizes "dying is easy, living is harder" is they think they're affirming this first Christian novelty of the inherent worth of individual life, but they end up undermining the second novelty of martyrdom, as if dying for something or someone is a primitive notion which we've moved beyond as enlightened moderns. and we have moved past it as moderns, because as moderns, like the pagans, we disbelieve in God and heaven. with no loving God who is Truth and no promised eternal life in which joy is full, the challenges of life threaten to overwhelm its small, meaningless pleasures and death begins to look like the easy way out. then do we have to be exhorted to go on living as a joyless duty. but that is not the Christian understanding of life! we do not accept despair as the normal view of life, and if that's how life appears to you, then be comforted in knowing that you are seeing it wrong. life is not hard! death is hard! and right now there is death in the midst of life, but be assured: life itself is so beautiful and joyful and full of laughter and love that it is worth dying for.

[francesderwent]

and to some extent there can of course be different emphases and different spiritualities! but to my original complaint: the "death is easy living is harder" sentiment is just NOT Chestertonian

“A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life.  A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything.”

from Orthodoxy, “The Flag of the World”     

"Now compared to these wanderers [Socrates, Buddha, etc.] the life of Jesus went as swift and straight as a thunderbolt. It was above all things dramatic; it did above all things consist in doing something that had to be done. It emphatically would not have been done, if Jesus had walked about the world for ever doing nothing except tell the truth. And even the external movement of it must not be described as a wandering in the sense of forgetting that it was a journey. This is where it was a fulfilment of the myths rather than of the philosophies; it is a journey with a goal and an object, like Jason going to find the Golden Fleece, or Hercules the golden apples of the Hesperides. The gold that he was seeking was death. The primary thing that he was going to do was to die. He was going to do other things equally definite and objective; we might almost say equally external and material. But from first to last the most definite fact is that he is going to die. No two things could possibly be more different than the death of Socrates and the death of Christ. We are meant to feel that the death of Socrates was, from the point of view of his friends at least, a stupid muddle and miscarriage of justice interfering with the flow of a humane and lucid, I had almost said a light philosophy. We are meant to feel that Death was the bride of Christ as Poverty was the bride of St. Francis. We are meant to feel that his life was in that sense a sort of love-affair with death, a romance of the pursuit of the ultimate sacrifice. From the moment when the star goes up like a birthday rocket to the moment when the sun is extinguished like a funeral torch, the whole story moves on wings with the speed and direction of a drama, ending in an act beyond words.”

from The Everlasting Man, “The Strangest Story in the World”

“And the really interesting thing is this, that the pagan was (in the main) happier and happier as he approached the earth, but sadder and sadder as he approached the heavens. The gaiety of the best Paganism, as in the playfulness of Catullus or Theocritus, is, indeed, an eternal gaiety never to be forgotten by a grateful humanity. But it is all a gaiety about the facts of life, not about its origin. To the pagan the small things are as sweet as the small brooks breaking out of the mountains; but the broad things are as bitter as the sea. When the pagan looks at the very core of the cosmos he is struck cold. Behind the gods, who are merely despotic, sit the fates, who are deadly. Nay, the fates are worse than deadly, they are dead. And when the rationalists say that the ancient world was more enlightened than the Christian, from their point of view they are right. For when they say ‘enlightened’ they mean darkened with incurable despair. It is profoundly true that the ancient world was more modern than the Christian. The common bond is in the fact that ancients and moderns have both been miserable about existence, about everything, while medieval were happy about that at least….The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live….Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man’s ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small. The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness in a sick-room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear…Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.”

from Orthodoxy, “Authority and the Adventurer"

[chechula]

Dragon and Princess sharing morning coffee, because I love moka pot design ♥ I made a sketch months ago but used it this week as anti-stress inking while sitting at Con. Inking is my comfort zone ♥

[countess--olenska]

Dior ‘Flamant Rose’ gown, 1948

[unaliveish]

sadie

[louisetaylor]

the lotr movies got eowyn wrong. yes the fighting was cool. "i am no man" scene was badass. but the point of eowyn is not "woman wants to fight, isn't allowed to, eventually gets to fight and that's her happy ending."

the point of eowyn is "woman is depressed, wants to be free/respected/seen/known/loved, is put in a (metaphorical) box with the other women, wants to fight bc it will bring her either Respect or Death."

she kills the dang Witch King. she fights and wins and it's awesome and satisfying. but fighting is NOT her happy ending. it's her sad ending. she ends up wounded and broken, like everyone else in this stupid WWI-trauma story. Like Frodo. Like Faramir.

I cannot emphasize enough that Faramir meets her AFTER she is UNABLE to fight (the only thing she thought gave her value and honor) and STILL admires and respects and loves her. Eowyn is more than a fighter. Eowyn is more than what she does. And for someone like me who's disabled from doing a lot of things that society expects of me, that means a lot.

[metamorphesque]

Moor me, mon amour, tathev simonyan

[danskjavlarna]

Source details and larger version.

I have some rather fun vintage bear imagery collected here.

[snoopyoftheday]

snoopy of the day

[malinaa]

what if we all explode

[derring-do]

This very production of Orpheus & Eurydice is now available to stream, free, for the month of June.

[digitalkiddo]

If you're writing anything involving cons, scams, heists, or morally questionable characters who are very good at lying, here are some free resources I've been using for research. Saving you the "why is this in my search history" anxiety.

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

Reblog to save for later. Your WIP will thank you.

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

Imagine The Fellowship all sitting around the campfire halfway up Caradhras retelling the events of the Hobbit to Boromir and Aragorn Rashomon-style with Gimli going "my dad tells it this way" and Legolas going "well, my dad tells it this way" and the Hobbits all going "but Bilbo tells it this way!" and, even though Gandalf was fucking there for half of it, he refuses to weigh in on anything because watching them argue is more fun and also he doesn't remember because it was over 75 years ago.

[felinecorpse]

Even better: Gandalf remembers it perfectly fine but he keeps making shit up and agreeing to multiple different versions just to throw everyone off

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

Too good to hide in the tags!

[bixbythemartian]

[id: screencap of tags from tumblr user queenincheck, tag is "#gaslight gatekeep Gandalf" /id]

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[fruitcakebro]

Holy moly they're GOOD. The music is fucking FIRE, and the outfits??? They're all so PRETTY???

[snoodly-boop]

Does anybody know who these are??? Do they have albums!! 🤩🤩🤩

[raspberryslut]

I was so curious that I had to go find this band. They're called Fortress Dwellers and they have a website with all of their socials!

They released an album too! I don't think this song is on it but the rest of their stuff is SO GOOD !!

MUSIC | Fortress Dwellers

Step into the fantasy world of Fortress Dwellers. A fantasy Renaissance musical collective blending epic original music, immersive performan