a lungful of joys

theo / 27

[nneeemmmzzzzzzzzzz]

Everything you struggle with is a path to God

[theoptia]

Arseny Tarkovsky, from Eurydice

Text ID: And I dream of a different soul / Dressed in other clothes: / Burning as it runs / From timidity to hope, / Spiritous and shadowless / Like fire it travels the earth, / Leaves lilac behind on the table / To be remembered by.

[weltenwellen]

Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase

[charmingnotion]

Jean Cocteau’s La belle et la bête, 1946

[metamorphesque]

musings on touch

margaret atwood, natalie diaz, ocean vuong, susan sontag, anne carson, marya hornbacher, mary oliver

[saintweaver]

Bob Kaufman, Darkwalking Endlessly

[weltenwellen]

Joy Sullivan, “When My Friend Is Low, We Walk by the River”, Instructions for Traveling West

[weltenwellen]

Mary Oliver, from “Starlings in Winter”, Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays

[jacindaelena]

Paris by sillage.an

[weltenwellen]

Joy Sullivan, from “On Days I Hate My Body, I Remember Redwoods”, Instructions for Traveling West

[ritualcircle]

William Blake - The Agony in the Garden (1800)

[thinkingimages]

[vfollia]

Concerning the mémoire involontaire: not only do its images not come when we try to call them up; rather, they are images which we have never seen before we remember them. This is most clearly the case in those images in which —like in some dreams— we see ourselves. We stand in front of ourselves, the way we might have stood somewhere in a prehistoric past, but never before our waking gaze. Yet these images, developed in the darkroom of the lived moment, are the most important we will ever see. One might say that our most profound moments have been equipped —like those cigarette packs —with a little image, a photograph of ourselves. And that “whole life” which, as they say, passes through people’s minds when they are dying or in mortal danger is composed of such little images. They flash by in as rapid a sequence as the booklets of our childhood, precursors of the cinema, in which we admired a boxer, a swimmer or a tennis player. [“A Short Speech on Proust,” delivered by Benjamin on his fortieth birthday, 1932]

[feral-ballad]

Kim Hyesoon, tr. by Don Mee Choi, from Autobiography of Death; “Winter’s Smile: Day Nineteen”

[vfollia]

“… all great work is the fruit of patience and perseverance, combined with tenacious concentration on a subject over a period of months or even years. Many illustrious scholars have confirmed this when questioned about the secret of their creations. Newton stated that he arrived at the sovereign law of universal attraction only by constant thinking about the same problem. According to one of his sons, Darwin achieved such a high degree of concentration on the biological facts related to the principle of evolution that for many years he systematically deprived himself of all reading and contemplation unrelated to the goal of his thoughts. Buffon said unreservedly, “Genius is simply patience carried to the extreme.” To those who asked how he achieved fame he replied: “By spending forty years of my life bent over my writing desk.” As a final example, it is widely known that Mayer, the genius who discovered the principle of energy conservation and transformation, dedicated his entire life to this concept. Thus, it is clear beyond doubt that great scientific undertakings require intellectual vigor, as well as severe discipline of the will and continuous subordination of all one’s mental powers to an object of study. Harm is caused unconsciously by the biographers of illustrious scholars when they attribute great scientific conquests to genius rather than to hard work and patience. What more could the weak will of the student or professor ask than to rationalise its laziness with the modest, and thus even more lamentable, admission of intellectual mediocrity! … Careful thought should make them realise how discouraging this can be to they readers.”

— Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Advice for a Young Investigator (tr. Neely Swanson and Larry W. Swanson)

[weltenwellen]

Alejandra Pizarnik, tr. by Yvette Siegert, "Extracting the Stone of Madness", Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972

[toiich]

"The Bite" (1914) — Edvard Munch

[fordarkmornings]

René-Xavier Prinet (French, 1861-1946) 

Between Friends, 1891