In Between Half Way

What can I say? I have an academic soul

[stay-close]

“Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.”

— Victor Hugo (via meineluft)

[weltenwellen]

“The world was suddenly still; nothing was being required of me; I could stand in the quiet of my own skin.”

— Maggie O’Farrell, from I am I am I am 

[shadow-literature]

“May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead”

Steven Knight, Peaky Blinders

[shadow-literature]

Masquerade

Anonymous in aristocracy,

Identity a sin,

Pale grey pathetic mask,

My pearlescent coffin.

We dance under the moonlight,

Fire in your eyes,

Decadence hides darkness,

A lonely harp sighs,

Ballroom absent of virtue,

Or emotion of any sort,

Just bleakly expensive dresses,

The ghosts host livelier court,

So thrums the revolution,

In our entwined arms,

The sound of striking match,

Begs us kiss with both our palms,

We are the necessary sacrifice,

In this masquerade ball,

Intruders on the wealthy dead,

And with grace we let masks fall.

[weltenwellen]

Wisława Szymborska, tr. by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak, from “Seen from Above”, Map: Collected and Last Poems

[shadow-literature]

“Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, like diamonds we are cut with our own dust”

John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

[weltenwellen]

Octavio Paz, tr. by Eliot Weinberger, from “Identical Time”, The Poems of Octavio Paz

[weltenwellen]

Louise Glück, from “Aubade”, Poems 1962 - 2012

[flowerytale]

Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Susan Gilbert Dickinson (late 1885)

[intopermanence]

“Love me or kill me.”

— Sarah Kane, from The Complete Plays: “Cleansed”

[flowerytale]

Mary Oliver ― Fall

[weltenwellen]

Alejandra Pizarnik, tr. by Yvette Siegert, from “Of Things Unseen”, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972

[shadow-literature]

There are eternal questions,

Questions which people will tell you are unanswerable,

Inevitable,

Too profound for human consciousness.

Religion will tell you not to fear death;

We do not die.

Hope will tell you to forget death;

We are too alive.

Love will tell you to hate death;

We cannot bear the loss.

But truth?

Truth will let you embrace death,

Not as a friend,

But as a reality,

A defining movement,

The final moment,

Unanswerable,

Inevitable,

Profoundest goodbye.

[flowerytale]

Simone de Beauvoir, from a letter to Jean-Paul Sartre (Tuesday, 8 August 1950)

[shadow-literature]

“Drive my dead thoughts over the universe”

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind

[shadow-literature]

“And like the cat I have nine times to die.”

Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus

[shisasan]

Hermann Hesse, Demian, (1919)