Marlowe & the Muse @marloweandthemuse - Tumblr Blog

Love, in other words

The mind that can find little excitement in life is a dying one; the mind that can not find something in the world that attracts it is dead, and the body housing it might as well be dead, for what are the uses of the five senses to a mind that takes no pleasure in them?

Having at long last realized that he must love or destroy himself, man is proceeding along his usual course by trying to evolve a science for it. The ultimate aim of psychoanalysis, when its special brand of semantics is put to rout, is to release man from his neuroses and thus enable him to love, and man’s capacity to love is measured by his degree of freedom from the drives that turn inward upon him. As one holds down a cork to the bottom of a stream, so may love be imprisoned by self: remove self, and love rises to the surface of man’s being.

With love, all things are possible.

Love restores. We have heard many tales of love’s power to heal, and we are skeptical of them, for we are human and therefore prone to deny the existence of things we do not understand and can not explain.

~ Harper Lee, published in Vogue, 15th April 1961

#Love in other words #Harper Lee #Vogue

photo by Martin Bühler

#Martin Bühler

Truth, Alexander Ebert

#Alexander Ebert #Truth

A young Charlie Chaplin

#Charlie Chaplin

David Bowie & Mick Jagger, 'Dancing in the street'

[NOTE: This is precisely what it feel like to submit a property law exam]

Drunk as Drunk

Translated from the Spanish by Christopher Logue

Drunk as drunk on turpentine From your open kisses, Your wet body wedged Between my wet body and the strake Of our boat that is made of flowers, Feasted, we guide it - our fingers Like tallows adorned with yellow metal - Over the sky's hot rim, The day's last breath in our sails.

Pinned by the sun between solstice And equinox, drowsy and tangled together We drifted for months and woke With the bitter taste of land on our lips, Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime And the sound of a rope Lowering a bucket down its well. Then, We came by night to the Fortunate Isles, And lay like fish Under the net of our kisses.

~ Pablo Neruda

#Pablo Neruda #Spanish #poem #poet

Beauty

#Cristina Ricci #babe #beauty

Dreaming of a Mix Tape

#mix tape #old fashioned lovers #1980's

If

IF you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream - and not make dreams your master; If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools: If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!' If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

~ Rudyard Kipling

#If #Rudyard Kipling #poem #poet #human

A Winter North: Skiing the Sacred Headwaters

#British Columbia #eco-system #ski #conservation #A Winter North: Skiing the Sacred Headwaters #winter #rivers #landscape

The Sense of an Ending

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents- were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers & bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen.

Like what? The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicided, death, God. And barn owls.

Of course there were other sorts of literature- theoretical, self referential, lachrymosely autobiographical- but they were just dry wanks.

Real literature was about psychological, emotional and social truth as demonstrated by the actions & reflections of its protagonists; the novel was about character development over time.

~ Julian Barnes, winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize

#The Sense of an Ending #Literature #social backdrop #bystander #Man Booker Prize #Julian Barnes