#this. book.

[itspileofgoodthings]

anyway it’s beautiful that the culmination of all of Darcy’s pining in the first part of Pride and Prejudice is him standing before Elizabeth saying that his heart (passion, desire) has won out over rational thinking and the beginning of Elizabeth’s last third of the book pining is her admitting to herself that actually she and Darcy make the most amount of sense together.

[queensinchains]

IN LIBRAS LIBERTAS may book club pick. the atlas six by olivie blake

❝ we are the gods of our own universes, aren’t we? destructive ones.  ❞ ―@olivieblake, the atlas six

inspo.

[soracities]

Ilya Kaminsky, ‘While the Child Sleeps Sonya Undresses’, Deaf Republic

[Text ID: “Soaping together is sacred to us. Washing each other’s shoulders. You can fuck anyone--but with whom can you sit in water?”]

[luxe-pauvre]

Axiomatising our belief system in our own lives is somewhat like axiomatising a mathematical system from an external point of view. We can start by thinking about all the things we believe to be true, and then we can try to boil them down to some basic beliefs from which everything else follows. Anything is valid really, as long as it doesn’t cause a logical contradiction, in which case your system of beliefs will collapse. Of course, this is only the case if you are trying to be a logical person. If you are not trying to be a logical person you might be perfectly happy believing a contradiction. But even two people who are logical might disagree about things just because they have different core beliefs - they are using different axioms. It doesn’t necessarily mean that one of them is being illogical. There are two slightly separate questions: how can we work out what our personal axioms are, and where did we get those axioms from? We can work out what our fundamental beliefs are by starting with anything we believe and asking why we believe it. The process of repeatedly asking “Why?” is a way of uncovering the deep logic behind something. It is one way of understanding what mathematics is: if we ask why aspects of the physical world work the way they do, the questions may be answered by science. If we ask why science works the way it does, the questions are answered by mathematics. If on the other hand we ask why aspects of the human world work the way they do, we are likely to end up in psychology and ultimately philosophy. Being able to answer our own “Why?” questions about beliefs requires us to have a certain amount of logical proficiency, so that we can uncover long chains of logical implications, as well as self-awareness. On the other hand, finding out what someone else’s axioms are requires us to have logical proficiency coupled with empathy. So we see that an interplay between logic and something more emotional comes in.

Eugenia Cheng, The Art of Logic: How to Make Sense in a World that Doesn't

[pilferingapples]

(about the Poland in1830) “A revolution afraid of a levee en masse was of course doomed” 

figuring out the political/historical POV of this book is like playing jai-alai with teleporting space demons 

I never know what direction the next hit is coming from 

[queensinchains]

okay but it’s the way oliver says “but that is how a tragedy like ours or king lear breaks your heart—by making you believe that the ending might still be happy, until the very last minute.” and that’s what you believe is going to happen because isn’t that how everything happens now

and it’s all going to pieces but you knew it would be and it hurts but you’re reconciled and then it all changes and there’s the possibility of a happier continuation (because it’s not an ending for the characters)

and I just think that’s such a perfect thing to have now, when so much media of this nature is just despair. and grief. and gloom. and payment for sins. and it’s not like there’s none of that it’s just

it’s not irredeemable and that’s so beautiful

[ilya-bonerov]

And it was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us the rope we could cross any river with. They balanced us high above any crevasse. They made us be natural acrobats. They made us be brave. They met us well. They changed us. It was in their nature to.

Girl Meets Boy, Ali Smith