A NUMBER OF YOUNG LOVERS

Some of my favourite things: Astronomy, books, bizarre natural phenomenon, Hawaii, Japan, Kitsch, maps, menswear, nauticality, New Sincerity, obscure sorrows, strange stories from history, the South Pole, zoology. My name is Matthew Hamblion and I am a writer and musician living in Brighton, England.

[theyounglovers]

[theyounglovers]

The good thing about writing books is that you can dream while you are awake.

Haruki Murakami

[nemfrog]

“The meteoric shower of November, 1866.” Nature and art. January 1, 1867. 

[humanoidhistory]

The Colossi of Memnon at the necropolis of Thebes, Egypt, 1965, during the seasonal flooding of the Nile. Photo by Eliot Elisofon. (Smithsonian)

[nemfrog]

Plate XLIII. Winged creatures and other mythological beings. Theory and practice of design, and advanced text-book on decorative art. 1894.

[nemfrog]

Plate XLIII. Moonlight and starlight.  A treatise on the art of painting, in all its branches.1817. 

[magictransistor]

Edward Hopper, Boy and Moon, c. 1907.

[theyounglovers]

I may lose. I may be lost. I may not make it anywhere. No matter what desperate efforts I make, it may be that things are already irretrievably damaged. I may be only scooping in vain the ashes of ruins, and the only one unaware of it is me. There may be no one here who will bet on my side. “I don’t mind,” I say in a small, determined voice to someone there. “I can say this. At least there are things I must wait for, and things I must seek.”

Haruki Murakami - The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (omitted from the English translation)

[dltmyccnt-deactivated20190812]

[quatermasspitt]

George Méliès as Mephistopheles in Le Roi Du Maquillage (1904).

[nemfrog]

“The giant sea turtle Archelon.” Animals of the past. American Museum of Natural History. 1929

[nemfrog]

“A flamingo city.” _The century magazine_ December 1904

“From a photograph by the author, colored under his direction.”

[theyounglovers]

Look what happens in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Puck’s eyedrops turn Lysander from an opportunistic womaniser into a devoted husband. In Shakespeare’s use of the magic potion, it is not that the object of desire itself is altered - the women are who they are - rather that the man is forced to see them differently. In the same play, Titania briefly falls for a clod wearing an ass’s head - a mischievous use of the transforming potion, but one that questions reality: Do we see what we think we see? Do we love as we believe we love?

Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

[theyounglovers]

I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood - or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

[fuckyeahexistentialism]

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

Anaïs Nin  (via stoicremains)

[misswallflower]

I love borders. August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know. Twilight is the border between day and night, and the shore is the border between sea and land. The border is longing; when both have fallen in love but still haven’t said anything. The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing.

Tove Jansson (via

celestinevibes

)

[theclassicsreader]

One has either to take people as they are, or leave them as they are. One cannot change them, one can merely disturb their balance. A human being, after all, is not made up of single pieces, from which a single piece can be taken out and replaced by something else.

Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice  (via kafkaesque-world)