things worth living for

a blog made up of things that i deem reason enough to spend another day or two on this blue green planet 🌎 mainly my original photography, poems, and prose :)

[1111bc-deactivated20200316]

ᴛʜᴇ ᴍᴀᴄᴀᴜʟᴀʏs

charles : anglo-saxon

'warrior'

camilla: roman, female form of camillus

'noble'

[jmelinaugarte]

[leadingplcyer]

my unusually specific aesthetic

clear starry nights, theatre major, urban lifestyle, writing essays on your own interests for the pleasure of it, annotated scripts, sheet music, all nighters, playing piano, lopsided glasses, turtlenecks, studying anatomy for artistic purposes, short dark and peach dyed hair, Sappho quotes on bookmarks, olive toned skin, peppermint mochas, vengeance

[lord-woolsley]

Reprinted, November, 1924.

[aeptaia]

𝐮𝐫𝐛𝐚𝐧 𝐝𝐚𝐫𝐤 𝐚𝐜𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐚

the misty blanket of fog that hangs low in the sky and veils the tops of the buildings

a street-corner singer, crooning softly and strumming their guitar with calloused fingers

a hidden coffee shop, tucked away in a tiny alley

scoping out the best second-hand book store

waiting for the subway at midnight whilst listening to soft jazz

a sea of umbrellas all moving as one as their owners hurry toward their destinations

reading from a rooftop terrace, feeling like you’re simply floating above the world

riding the bus in the rain, passing the time by thumbing through a well-worn anthology of romantic era poetry

researching the history of the city, and making it a goal to find the still-standing historical landmarks

[ladycondescension]

Ways I want to incorporate dark academia into my life

- listening to classical music and hymns in Latin

- devoting myself absolutely to my studies, writing, reading, playing viola, and love

- stopping to appreciate small things

- wearing vintage, academic, menswear-esque clothes found mostly at the thrift store and my grandmother’s closet

- drinking tea in excess and mulled grape juice from wine glasses (because I’m not 21 lol)

- (accidentally) staying up too late and getting up too early

- reading more classic and gothic literature

- playing viola and piano late at night

- studying Latin even more than I already do (I was a Latin nerd before I was a dark academia fiend).

- expanding my vocabulary

- studying french, italian, and german

- Aspiring to go to a small school on the east coast (something I was already doing)

- Taking IB and all the classes/research involved purely for the love of knowlege

- Wearing dark lipstick that makes my lips look winestained (or bloodstained) and darkening my brows without tidying them up

- wearing ribbons in my hair

- getting my books from secondhand shops or checking them out from the library (this not only fits the aesthetic, but is also better for the environment and way cheaper!! Plus it helps libraries stay up and running if your government sees that they’re still popular!! I could make a whole post about this but yeah. I recommend this to anyone who loves books, especially if you tend to spend all your money on them👀).

- reading/studying by candlelight at night or natural light during the day

- drinking black coffee at all hours of the day

- wandering around antique shops, libraries, small bookstores, historical sights, and local forest trails

- reading books in their original language (if they’re in Latin)

- finding old, clothbound books on obscure subjects from the library or antique/secondhand shops

- wearing fragrances that smell either of book bindings or musky scents

[postapocalyptic-cryptic-hold]

Chaotic academia is

1.) Intense obsessions that last maybe two weeks but consume your soul

2.) Spacing out in class but loving to learn

3.) Swearing and slang while discussing deep academic topics

[icedcoffeeandmurder]

i want windswept hair, i want shirts not buttoned quite right but i’m late for class so i don’t care. i want long nights and longer mornings, strong candles burning behind conversations about plato’s divine madness.  I want wine stained lips debating over latin etymology or computer code or whatever springs to mind. i want to be so exhausted from sheer knowledge and love it. I want to be pretentious and to be a mess because why not. 

[gcnesistorevelation]

dark academia literary works: a masterlist

Hello! I replied to this post on Reddit today, trying to compile all the dark academia books I could think of, and then thought that maybe all of you here might find it useful too, so here you go. It is a very, very broad list, a mix of classic and contemporary literature, and there is no set criteria besides having a dark vibe (this includes murder and crime but could just be the way it’s written as well) and portraying an academic setting, most of the time from the student’s point of view. I haven’t read all of these myself and so I can’t judge on quality, but hopefully this will inspire people to add on to it in the comments.

Here you go!

The Lessons by Naomi Alderman Truly, Devious by Maureen Johnson The Secret History, Donna Tartt If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio Maurice by E. M. Forster The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Possession by A.S. Byatt The Truants by Kate Weinberg The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark Vicious by V. E. Schwab The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater (tangentially related) A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro The Likeness by Tana French The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (coming out tomorrow!) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman Oleanna by David Mamet Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Other classics that are not Dark Academia in content, but which I would include in a list of the DA canon: The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer Shakespeare’s plays (Macbeth, Hamlet are good ones to start with) A Separate Peace, John Knowles The Bacchae, Euripides Greek tragedies (a good one to start with is Antigone, very popular and staged many a time) Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman Beat generation literature Jane Austen’s books (light academia, anyone?)

[coffeebloom]

oh to be a poetess and to write flawless brain regurgitations all day surrounded by plants and beautiful things, hosting literature clubs n getting lit at 2am yelling bacchic hymns

[walkingthroughhistory-deactivat]

Psychology students and law students share a specific vibe but no one knows exactly what it is.

[bonclay47]

Dark academia

• Pride and prejudice

• Endeavor

• Plein soleil

• The talented mr. Ripley

• Dead poet society

• Atonement

• A room with a view

• Maurice

• Brideshead revisited

[ranaeissance]

october 1st, 2019

“We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

ft. @studyplants // @jawnkeets // @sarahfromparis

[lessfamiliarsouls]

guide to being the dark academic you’ve always aspired to be

1. stand in the middle of a lake staring at the way the moonlight reflects off the blood on your hands

2. start using words with more syllables because it sounds smarter and you need everyone to know how smart you are so they won’t know you bribed your way into the gentleman’s club

3. cover your chin with a black scarf so people can’t see the scar you got from turning the pages of the encyclopaedia too quickly

4. clutter your room with things that you bought from old charity shops, so you can watch them collect dust (and so you won’t have to look at that mysterious red stain on the floor)

5. buy a coffin to sleep in (you can find one secondhand if it’s too expensive - don’t worry, that just adds to the mystique). 

6. string balls of cosy yarn across the floor, lest any intruders come. this way, you can catch them easily. 

7. spell your name wrong to prevent identity theft

8. cut all your hair off in an attempt to become someone else and then send the locks to your neighbours (don’t provide context)

9. dig yourself a grave four feet to the left of the nearest skyscraper

10. don’t look behind your shoulder or you’ll see her. donna. 

[moonnaiden-deactivated20200408]

Where artemis would live 🌙

[aircademia]

modern dark academia

~ the cold glow of a laptop screen illuminating an otherwise dark room;

~ stacks of printed class handouts piled on the desk, messy and disorganised to all but the one they belong to;

~ textbooks with notes and observations scribbled hastily in the margin in black biro, important passages circled and underlined with feverish vigour;

~ a half-drunk cup of takeout coffee, its contents abandoned in favour of a sudden breakthrough;

~ a jacket draped over the back of a plastic library chair for hours on end;

~ the harsh fluorescent lights of a university corridor late at night, a single set of footsteps cutting through the silence.

[ca-tk-in]

Places I want to live:

A lighthouse on a lonely island; on the rocks, huge grey waves crashing and spraying white sea foam, a black and white collie for company, round rooms and a spiral staircase, windows with a view over a stormy sea and far-stretching green fields, a boat ride to the mainland, comfortable silence

An old castle in Scotland; secret passageways and underground tunnels, overgrown gardens covered in purple gorse, ivy growing up grey stone walls, a haunted gallery, a library filled with leather-bound books, empty suits of armours and angel statues in the grounds, a bookcase door leading to a hidden attic

An apartment above a bakery; smell of fresh bread coming up through bare floorboards, early morning starts, a window seat to read in, bright sunlit rooms, a small black cat curled up on a comfy bed, colourful flowers on a balcony overlooking a cobble square, cooking dinner with friends in a tiny kitchen

A cottage in a small Cornish village; low ceilings with wooden beams, burning fires in an old fireplace in winter, writing poetry in the garden, thriving vegetable patches, sprigs of lavender hanging from the ceiling, a horseshoe over a green-painted front door, baking cakes for the farmers’ market