LACUNA

giselle / uk

[antigonick]

I liked the idea of living in a city — any city, especially a strange one — liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History (via antigonick)

[luthienne]

jeanette winterson, why be happy when you could be normal? / stephen hannock, golden launch at dawn / h.d., “eurydice”

[sleepygogh]

[timotaychalamet]

“If you ever left me I’d tear my heart out and never put it back.”

Paterson (2016) dir. Jim Jarmusch

[lost-syllable]

Just outside the apartment window was a kite caught in the telegraph wires; blown about and ripped by the dusty spring wind, it nevertheless clung tenaciously to the wires, as if in affirmation of something. Every time I looked at the kite, I had to smile with embarrassment and blush. It haunted me even in dreams.

osamu dazai, “no longer human”

[elliscky]

Hogar colour study #05 follow me on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elliscky/

[objetpetita]

“I had two longings and one was fighting the other. I wanted to be loved and I wanted to be always alone.” —Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

“Alone. That’s the only way. [Alone]” — Virginia Woolf, The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf; Selected Diaries

“I? I walk alone;” —Sylvia Plath, Soliloquy of the Solipsist

“Now I know: I’m alone. I and my freedom that I don’t know how to use. Great responsibility of solitude. Whoever isn’t lost doesn’t know freedom and love it. As for me, I own up to my solitude that sometimes falls into ecstasy as before fireworks. I am alone and must live a certain intimate glory that in solitude can become pain. And the pain, silence.” —Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

“There are not two of us. Each of us is alone.” — Marguerite Duras, No More / C’est Tout

[gravellyrun]

People slip in and out of the story they’re living all the time; daily life is full of moments of rupture, disappearance and interiority.

Mark Doty form The Art of Description: World into Word (via gravellyrun)

[annachara]

[kxowledge]

Gabriel García Márquez, The Art of Fiction No. 69 in The Paris Review

[lost-syllable]

Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes. That is the one and only thing I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell. Everything passes.

osamu dazai, “no longer human”

[lost-syllable]

I thought, “I want to die. I want to die more than ever before. There’s no chance now of a recovery. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, it’s sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. That dream of going on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in summer leaves—it was not for the likes of me. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin.

osamu dazai, “no longer human”

[lost-syllable]

I gradually came to relax my vigilance towards the world. I came to think that it was not such a dreadful place. My feelings of panic had been molded by the unholy fear aroused in me by such superstitions of science as the hundreds of thousands of whooping-cough germs borne by the spring breezes, the hundreds of thousands of eye-destroying bacteria which infest the public baths, the hundreds of thousands of microbes in a barber shop which will cause baldness, the swarms of scabious parasites infecting the leather straps in the subway cars; or the tapeworm, fluke and heaven knows what eggs that undoubtedly lurk in raw fish and in undercooked beef and pork; or the fact that if you walk barefoot a tiny sliver of glass may penetrate the sole of your foot and after circulating through your body reach the eye and cause blindness. There is no disputing the accurate, scientific fact that millions of germs are floating, swimming, wriggling everywhere. At the same time, however, if you ignore them completely they lose all possible connection with yourself, and at once become nothing more than vanishing “ghosts of science.” This too I came to understand. I had been so terrorized by scientific statistics (if ten million people each leave over three grains of rice from their lunch, how many sacks of rice are wasted in one day; if ten million people each economize one paper handkerchief a day, how much pulp will be saved?) that whenever I left over a single grain of rice, whenever I blew my nose, I imagined that I was wasting mountains of rice, tons of paper, and I fell prey to a mood dark as if I had committed some terrible crime. But these were the lies of science, the lies of statistics and mathematics: you can’t collect three grains of rice from everybody. Even as an exercise in multiplication or division, it ranks as one of the most elementary and feeble-minded problems, about on a par with the computation of the percentage of times that people slip in dark, unlighted bathrooms and fall into the toilet, or the percentage of passengers who get their feet caught in the space between the door of a subway train and the edge of the platform, or other such footling exercises in probability. These events seem entirely within the bounds of possibility, but I have never heard a single instance of anyone hurting himself by falling into the toilet. I felt pity and contempt for the self which until yesterday had accepted such hypothetical situations as eminently factual scientific truths and was terrified by them. This shows the degree to which I had bit by bit arrived at a knowledge of the real nature of what is called the world.

osamu dazai, “no longer human”

[lost-syllable]

We began a guessing game of tragic and comic nouns. This game, which I myself had invented, was based on the proposition that just as nouns could be divided into masculine, feminine and neuter, so there was a distinction between tragic and comic nouns. For example, this system decreed that steamship and steam engine were both tragic nouns, while streetcar and bus were comic. Persons who failed to see why this was true were obviously unqualified to discuss art, and a playwright who included even a single tragic noun in a comedy showed himself a failure if for no other reason. The same held equally true of comic nouns in tragedies.   I began the questioning. “Are you ready? What is tobacco?”   "Tragic,“ Horiki answered promptly.   "What about medicine?”   "Powder or pills?“   "Injection.”   "Tragic.“   "I wonder. Don’t forget, there are hormone injections too.”   "No, there’s no question but it’s tragic. First of all, there’s a needle—what could be more tragic than a needle?“   "You win. But, you know, medicines and doctors are, surprisingly enough, comic. What about death?”   "Comic. And that goes for Christian ministers and Buddhist priests, too.“   "Bravo! Then life must be tragic?”   "Wrong. It’s comic, too.“   "In that case everything becomes comic. Here’s one more for you. What about cartoonist? You couldn’t possibly call it a comic noun, could you?”   "Tragic. An extremely tragic noun.“   "What do you mean? Extremely tragic is a good description of you."

osamu dazai, “no longer human”

[melisica]

Crystal Gregory

[nitrogen]

By David Uzochukwu

[invitedbonfire]