DEAD LETTERS

In a horror story, the victim keeps asking why - but there can be no explanation, and there shouldn’t be one. The unanswered mystery is what stays with us the longest, and it’s what we’ll remember in the end.

[malpaise]

[melanqole]

where the greenery stings.

[jeaniefranklins]

Mike Flanagan's The Picture of Dorian Gray: Dorian and Sybil get married and Dorian is saved by the redemptive power of family.

Mike Flanagan's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Mr. Hyde is snapped out of it by his daughter (who he has in this version) nobly sacrificing himself so that she and Jekyll can live happily ever after.

Mike Flanagan's The Yellow Wallpaper: the narrator gets to see her baby and is so overcome with love that she recovers and rejoins the family.

Mike Flanagan's The Woman In Black: Arthur manages to reunite Jennet and Nathaniel's ghosts, and they walk off into the sunset together holding hands.

Mike Flanagan's We Have Always Lived In The Castle: Constance and Merricat hug it out.

Mike Flanagan's The Ring: Reiko adopts Sadako's ghost and raises her with Yoichi.

[it-appears-that-bruno-has-deact]

[batavias]

Doctor says I got the depression from a lavender bush growing outside my house. Yep. The smell drifting in through open windows in the summer heat made me melancholy. [reacting to everyone's incredulousness and getting defensive and aggressive] I'm telling you that's what he fucking SAID. He said scents can bring about a mournfulness in the soul. No. He said there's nothing to be done about it now

[laferrarii]

opening Tumblr is like a cigarette break

[loveisfourw4lls]

imagine you're in a world cup final, you finally get a break, and then bts starts singing.... i'd walk off the pitch

[visenyaism]

This is the RIVERLANDS we BETRAY OURSELVES FOR NOTHING and DIE in our THOUSANDS NAMELESS and PURPOSELESS and FORGOTTEN BY THE NARRATIVE in the MUD and they will SING NO SONGS OF IT take your sensitive ass back to the reach!!!!!!!

[malpaise]

this motherfucker got me listening to yves tumor on a monday morning and loving it i truly cannot stand it

[deadbeatmaker]

hannibal and will weren’t even toxic. all of that was normal

[deadbeatmaker]

armand is also normal

[whatsupwoes-deactivated20240313]

Are you single?????

You'll never fix me and I'll never see you as a person.

[everyday-cutephoto]

[raylangivins]

[malpaise]

that was like watching a 10 car pile up

[malpaise]

i'm getting a lot of polish posts recommended to me for some reason. guess i'll learn the language then

[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.

[jareckiworld]

Alexis Mata — The Mirror in the Desert (oil on canvas, 2024)