it’s time to come back from the dark

Call me Vi! She/her. Lover of stories in all their forms. Tea addict. Christian. Daydreamer. Nerd. Art Tumblr: @artbyviema

[soracities]

i do, often, think of that quote from wislawa szymborska talking about love and the inexplicability of some of it. "great love is never justified" etc. and it truly isn't. and thank god for that.

[soracities]

"We’re dealing here with the phenomenon of great love. Detached observers always ask in such cases: “So what does she (he) see in him (her)?” Such questions are best left in peace: great love is never justified. It’s like the little tree that springs up in some inexplicable fashion on the side of a cliff: where are its roots, what does it feed on, what miracle produces those green leaves? But it does exist and it really is green—clearly, then, it’s getting whatever it needs to survive."

— from "Great Love", in Nonrequired Reading

[the-real-seebs]

Someone linked me this beautiful poster, and I'm just really impressed.

My contribution:

[urgetocreate]

Grzegorz Jacek Olejniczak (Polish b.1968), Before the Storm, 2025, Oil on canvas

[youngerfrankenstein]

To put it very bluntly.

You will always make a better impact helping people who need it than trying to hurt people you think deserve it.

[myelicia]

[mantisliberationfront]

I think venus flytraps should be intelligent and ambulatory. I think they should get into the cupboards. I think they should purr when you pet them.

[prismatic-bell]

OP there is an entire Broadway musical explaining why you don’t want that

[bbcwhereareyou]

There’s a Broadway musical about them, too.

[itspileofgoodthings]

one of many (many) reasons I love Austen so much is she makes goodness and virtue seem as sexy as they actually are.

[lydiahosek]

#there is not this false dichotomy of good and safe (but boring) and bad and dangerous (but attractive) #when you strip things down to their essence #bad behavior and un-virtuous behavior. literally vicious behavior #is #so #unsexy #and goodness is so attractive!

[kosmogrl]

[catie-does-things]

There is reasonable discussion about the problem of evil to be had, but I dont think we should lose sight of the fact that God's answer to human suffering is the cross. We don't have the proper perspective on this question at all if we approach it like evil is something God merely allows humanity to suffer, rather than something he himself suffers first and foremost, and for our sake.

[itspileofgoodthings]

One of my senior boys, writing an essay on crime and punishment, paraphrased the opening line of Emma to describe Raskolnikov. (See below.) This is what teacher dreams are made of. To me.

“Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov, handsome, clever, and very very poor, with a tumultuous loft and an emo disposition, seemed to unite some of the saddest blessings in existence, and had lived 23 years in the world with many a thing to distress and vex him.”

[francesderwent]

back on my “it’s very important that cowardice is a vice, actually” hobbyhorse ✌️

[francesderwent]

coruscanttojerusalem said: want to say more?

I can try!

I don’t mean this in a judgy way; vice doesn’t first and foremost make you a “bad person” in the way tumblr means it (a hateable person)—but it does kind of make you bad at being a person. vice is an entrenched habit which prevents you from realizing happiness and fulfillment, and cowardice absolutely does this.

it seems like people are starting to catch on to the fact that if your fears are preventing you from ever having joys, then you have given your fears too much power. Mr. Woodhouse from Emma is a great example of this kind of character. his fears have completely prevented him from living a full life and regularly prevent him from enjoying even the small pleasures he has left. and crucially, this isn’t just something he’s done to himself. his cowardice also causes suffering for those around him, both in small ways (subjecting Emma to painful social moments) and in large (almost costing Emma her happiness with Knightley). if your fears have enclosed you into a progressively smaller and smaller box in your quest to feel perfectly safe (even and especially from things that objectively are no threat to your safety), then I think you have a real responsibility to try to face your fears and heal whatever is making you believe that they were worth losing everything. you have this responsibility because you were born to be a full human being, not a caged animal.

but there’s also another sense in which cowardice is a vice. if you possess every other virtue, if your system of values is perfect and just, but you crumble when under pressure, then you do not fully possess those virtues and you’re not able to live up to your own values. all virtues depend on each other; everyone has areas that they’re more naturally gifted in or they’ve practiced more, but you cannot completely leave out one virtue without cancelling out the ones you do have. courage is especially universal, because it is all other virtues practiced under fire. if you cannot be kind or you cannot practice justice as soon as it is difficult, then you’re not very kind or just at all.

this isn’t to say that we can’t be understanding and compassionate towards someone who caves or freezes in a moment of fear, and it certainly isn’t to say that there can’t be mercy after the fact. but it is to say that we have to be able to recognize the entrenched habit of the person who consistently prioritizes their own comfort and their own safety over everything else—especially when the safety being prioritized is a “feeling” of safety not based in reality or a social safety related to reputation, instead of a real threat on their life. if your fears prevent you from living out your convictions, then your convictions are pretty worthless. if there’s nothing you love more than your own skin, then you can’t love anything very much.

all this to say that I think we are slightly too quick to give a blanket pass to anyone who fails to do the right thing when it is hard. we don’t have to pretend it isn’t hard. but that’s precisely the point. we’ve forgotten that an essential part of the moral life, i.e. being a fully developed person living a full life, is the virtue of doing hard things.

[itspileofgoodthings]

I love that the end of Pride and Prejudice is just the vindication of things sometimes being good, good all the way down. Lizzy struggles the last third of the novel with trying to reconcile what she thinks life is, as a self-professed cynic/realist/someone who is not going to fall into dumb traps that will ruin her happiness, and what she hopes it WILL be as a woman who has actually met the love of her life. And it ends up being all that she wanted and more. Darcy’s love is not only unchanged by all the things she was afraid would undo it, the depth and enduring quality of that love has been revealed to her by those very things. The end of the book confirms his generosity, his heart, his faithfulness in ways she could never dream of hoping for, and in those last several chapters desperately tries not to hope for, constantly tries to talk herself out of wanting or expecting. But it’s all true. He is handsome and he’s rich and marriageable, he checks all the standard boxes, but so much more importantly he’s also good and faithful and sensitive and endlessly generous and the most ultimately solid and trustworthy and good person she’s ever met in her entire life. And she gets to marry him! The fairy tale, in this case, is TRUE; her cynicism–and even her funniest most light-hearted truest jokes about the unfairness of the world were still a kind of cynicism–is not. I love it, it’s everything.

[itspileofgoodthings]

It’s good but it’s no high school musical 3 rooftop dance scene.

[gaeneric]

ladies, your 4th, 10th, and last most recent emojis describe your character's only personality traits in a movie written by a man

[thisbibliomaniac]

🔪😔💅

[itspileofgoodthings]

“… like Jane Austen but better”

[medievaljournalist]

great. a chivalric order has started nesting under my porch & theres no way i can afford a warlock to come clear it out so i guess now ive got to deal with men-at-arms swearing oaths of valor right outside my window at 4 am every morning

[icannotbejondenden47]

It is not your business to succeed (no one can be sure of that) but to do right: when you have done so, the rest lies with God.

C.S. Lewis