Everything Is More Beautiful Because We Are Doomed

We will never be here again 24 - he/him

[thoughtstherapy]

Images that you would probably not see again @thoughtstherapy

[jaanii]

the brief foray from summer to fall

whisper of the heart (1995) // francis forever, mitski // september tomatoes, karina borowicz // summer nights, grease // the parent trap (1998) // on earth we’re briefly gorgeous, ocean vuong // i found love, the free design // wheatstacks (end of summer), claude monet // you don’t have to like me, alida nugent // the unabridged journals of sylvia plath, sylvia plath

[sidereusimber]

Charmaine J. Forde // Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos // Virginia Woolf // Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry, September 1st 1938 // Virginia Woolf // September, Helen Hunt Jackson // Vermont, Rowland E. Robinson // September Song” by Geoffrey Hill, New and Collected Poems, 1952-1992 // Virginia Woolf // beginning and ending with my death by zeina hashem beck // Anne Brontë ― The Tenant of Wildfell Hall // memory of water by reina maría rodríguez // Mihail Sebastian, For Two Thousand Years (trans. Philip Ó Ceallaigh)// evening star, faith baldwin //Arthur Schnitzler

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,16, 17, 18, 19

[pigeonriot]

autumn: nostalgia - melancholy - change

Sylvia Plath - The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath // David Hettinger // Dante Gabriel Rossetti // Holly Warburton - spirit hold // Mitski - Francis Forever // Jackson Pollock - Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) // Elizabeth Burnam // Autumn Landscape With Four Trees - Vincent Van Gogh // E.M. Foster - Maurice // C Michael Dudash - Autumn Bridge // Janice Gould - Earthquake weather

[myunderground]

— on loneliness

Edward Hopper, Automat / Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life / Andrei Tarkovsky, The Mirror / Jane O’Wayne, With Solitude / Andrei Tarkovsky, Nostalghia/ Maggie Nelson, Bluets / Heather Havrilesky, Ask Polly: Help, I’m The Loneliest Person In The World! / Edward Hopper, Summer Interior / Daniel Johnston, Desperate Man Blues / Edward Hopper, Nighthawks

[bakwaaas]

@fairycosmos / Comic by @shhhitsfine / Comic by @incendavery

[bakwaaas]

@ryebreadgf / alison zai / phillip roth / unknown / @archbudzar

[firstfullmoon]

I made it through April, May, June; it seemed I had outsmarted grief but pulled the hanged man card repeatedly—the self-same sorrow said a different way.

— Maya C. Popa, from “Signal”

[lelif]

childhood

?// the opposite of a haunting is something very lonely, katie maria (by @heavensghost )// @smokedsugar// @mango-season// virgin suicides (1999)// aristotle and dante discover the secrets of the universe, benjamin alire sáenz//empty bed, cavetown// @princesskuragina// to die for, carol lee// anna haifisch// amy dunne// look who's inside again, bo burnham// how'd your parents die again, fatima asghar// richey edwards

[metamorphesque]

Wendy Cope, From June to December: Summer Villanelle

[allsadnshit]

I will never get over how weird it feels to have tragic and emotional chapters of your life where you just also still go to work, and the grocery store, and see funny videos online all while feeling such paralyzing fear and heartache

life just goes on no matter what

[allsadnshit]

I will never get over how weird it feels to have tragic and emotional chapters of your life where you just also still go to work, and the grocery store, and see funny videos online all while feeling such paralyzing fear and heartache

life just goes on no matter what

[arrows-for-pens]

[inkskinned]

sometimes i think about the span of human existence and how if you spread your arms out in a long line and said my body is acting as a poem of all the universe's birthdays, the smallest sliver of your furthest nail would be our entire history as humans. and you, doing this, feeling your sternum crack into place because you're-getting-old and all of your bones crunch these days: you are the universe, measuring its own timeline. you're the memory of a starburst saying i gave birth to humans at the tip of my finger.

and i think about how crocodiles have been around for way longer than that fingernail and how sharks have been here forever too and how there are sea cucumbers that understand time like an angel would; their ages so astronomically long that i get dizzy looking down into them. i think about my dog, and how i am so fantastically ancient to him (an impossible number, staggering) and how, at the same time, i can order my life in eras of pets-i-have-loved and how my childhood died when my cat did.

and i wonder if the earth does the same thing, if nature keeps time in epochs. if the tree in the house where i grew up said oh a new family and got upset when one by one we all left for college and left behind our climbing and screaming and birdhouses. that same tree collapsed during a bad storm this winter; heartbroken. the whole inside was a hull, shivering and empty. it missed our roof by a whisper, almost like it held itself together so it couldn't pass a hole into the house it's been looking into for years now. the people who took it away clicked their teeth. it was a hundred years old, at least.

there are things that went extinct in my lifetime. there are memories that don't extend to the tip of the finger. four years ago, for the first time: i saw a bald eagle in the wild. ever since they've been sprouting strangely in my life, their origami frames hunched in a racket of brown feathers. something in the motion of wild animals braced against the new england weather - like we all (all of nature, all of the fingertip) have the same shared hate when it's cold sorrow. like in years and years and years of history we never really evolved a better method than to close your eyes and brace yourself against it.

i saw a butterfly today, staggering drunkenly in the early spring air. it's too early for her other friends. i want to tuck her back into bed and say it's not your time yet! her life like a pinprick in my own. in butterfly school they'd have to stretch out their scales and say - at the end of your furthest wing is where you are in the life of a human. she is in my life, isn't she. something about how my heart seized at the sight of her, so brave and lonely and unfair; and how it snowed yesterday (and will snow again, probably), and how, in spite of that, she was out there and flying.

something about waking up this morning and thinking - i'm too old for this. how my hips and knees and back all make new noises. how the other day at a grocery store i picked up the gloves an older woman had dropped, how she'd laughed and thanked me - i can't bend down like you young folks anymore.

something about the theory that there's been no visible life on other planets because we are too early. that we are the first butterfly of spring. all this bravery. we know it is probably hopeless, and still we go. breathless, the same tactic - we brace against the cold.

[cubedcoffeecake]

my first thought when I read poetry this incredible is just to enjoy the words and the feelings they've managed to capture and release back out.

then I think about how people see me write, sometimes, at the mechanic or in a restaurant, and ask "oh, do you write poetry?" and I laugh awkwardly and assure them I do not, as cool as that would be. I think about how I just can't catch feelings and express them quite write when I write them down. I tear myself down the middle in appreciation for the poet and in self-criticism that I can't write like that.

I like to write down other people's words in my own letters, though. I break apart poems and lyrics and paragraphs into my own spacing and I've found that it almost feels like I'm writing the poem for myself, sometimes.

idk. I'm thinking thoughts I guess. really enjoyed this poetry today.

[maddieisnotreal]

the collected stories of colette by colette, translated by matthew ward // red bird by mary oliver // elegy by chen chen // don’t know // quote by charlotte eriksson // a pot of red lentils by peter pereira // days with frog and toad by arnold lobe // brideshead revisited by evelyn waugh

[kushblazer666]

[seriousmysteries]

In his book In Our Own Image (2015), the artificial intelligence expert George Zarkadakis describes six different metaphors people have employed over the past 2,000 years to try to explain human intelligence.

In the earliest one, eventually preserved in the Bible, humans were formed from clay or dirt, which an intelligent god then infused with its spirit. That spirit ‘explained’ our intelligence – grammatically, at least.

The invention of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body – the ‘humours’ – accounted for both our physical and mental functioning. The hydraulic metaphor persisted for more than 1,600 years, handicapping medical practice all the while.

By the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring leading thinkers such as René Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines. In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain. By the 1700s, discoveries about electricity and chemistry led to new theories of human intelligence – again, largely metaphorical in nature. In the mid-1800s, inspired by recent advances in communications, the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared the brain to a telegraph.

Each metaphor reflected the most advanced thinking of the era that spawned it. Predictably, just a few years after the dawn of computer technology in the 1940s, the brain was said to operate like a computer, with the role of physical hardware played by the brain itself and our thoughts serving as software. The landmark event that launched what is now broadly called ‘cognitive science’ was the publication of Language and Communication (1951) by the psychologist George Miller. Miller proposed that the mental world could be studied rigorously using concepts from information theory, computation and linguistics.

—from The Empty Brain by Robert Epstein for Aeon

[primulaceas]

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Sifter.” A Maze Me: Poems for Girls

[snackwizard]

a fools guide to not wanting to die anymore

by me, a fool who doesnt wanna die anymore 

never make a suicide joke again. yes this includes “i wanna die” as a figure of speech. swear off of it. actually make an effort to change how you think about things.

find something to compliment someone for at least 4 times a day. notice the little things about the world that make you happy, and use that to make other people happy.

talk to people. initiate conversation as often as you possibly can. keep your mind busy and you wont have to worry anymore

picture the bad intrusive thoughts in youe head as an edgy 13 year old and tell them to go be emo somewhere else

if someone makes you feel bad most of the time, stop talking to them. making yourself hang out with people who drain you is self harm. stop it.

[wildlyannoyingdoofus]

… 8|

That’s some pretty good advice. I don’t know what’s left of my humor after ‘guess I’ll just die’ jokes but it’s worth a shot.

[snackwizard]

Personally i went from “guess I’ll die” jokes to “IF I HAVE TO BE HERE FOR 5 MORE MINUTES I PROMISE YOU I WILL BUY JUST, AN ARRAY OF CLOTHES.” and other wild hyperbolic stuff. Just replace the death part with something ridiculous and off topic. Its very entertaining

[808lien]

This also works with calling myself things like stupid, worthless, trash, etc. Even if you do this jokingly to yourself, your brain still believes it, and keeps up the cycle. Seriously, I found that when I stopped saying these things about myself, even jokingly, it made a massive difference.

[maramahan]

Here’s a tip I picked up from a friend that’s helped me a lot — replace self deprecating jokes with ironically self aggrandizing jokes

Like every time I trip and fall, instead of saying “l’m just a disaster human” I say “I’m the epitome of grace and beauty”

Or like, when I draw a picture I’m not 100% happy with, instead of saying “my art is trash” I say something like “you know I think it’s time we replaced the Mona Lisa”

When you do that you get to make a joke, but you’re ALSO getting practice building yourself up, y’know?

And eventually it becomes a reflex and you get so used to it that you can say nice stuff about yourself even when you AREN’T joking

[jkl-fff]

[scottjate]

This is so important

[graylinesspam]

That self-aggrandizing technique is no joke.

I replaced “I’m stupid” with “I’m a God damn genius.” “Move over newton” “another masterpiece”

I replaced “gross/ disgusting” with “sexy/attractive” “the hight of elegance”

I replaced “I suck/ that sucked/ this is bad” with “fantastic”, “a lovely time”, “ swell/jolly good”

Replace every negative with a positive. Say it so sarcastically. Make it complicated make it entertaining have fun with it.

It will stop your self deprecating and build confidence. And people are more easygoing around you.

[slfcare]

Beauty exists because life exists. Vibrant plants look best when they’re well taken care of. Fields of green and patches of grass look best when they’re watered regularly. You can tell when a pet is doing well, fed well, brushed and washed and loved. In people, someone’s kindness makes them more beautiful. Someone’s sense of humor. The snort when they laugh. The way they mispronounce certain words, their habits, their individuality. The color in their cheeks, the little scars and the stories behind them (fell off of a trampoline, thought I could swing without holding onto anything, my sister hit me with the remote because we were fighting over the remote—and the way they laugh or shake their head telling the story). Expressing their emotions. Being fragile and soft. Being loud and talkative. Beauty is so interesting because it goes farther than outward appearances, and sometimes even seems to affect it. I think, the more unapologetically alive you are, the more beautiful you are. The more you find beauty in other people, in the depths of them and not just the way they look, the more you’ll find it in yourself.

[slfcare]

The more you find beauty in other people, in the depths of them and not just the way they look, the more you’ll find it in yourself.

I think this is the most valuable lesson I’ve learned about self love and self acceptance (and self confidence). As a teenager, I spent so much time admiring people for the way they looked, but I barely paid attention to the way people were in comparison. When you keep tying other people’s value to their beauty, you’re subconsciously teaching yourself that that’s where a person’s worth lies. After all, that’s what you pay most attention to, as well.

But then you get older. You start to appreciate the way someone can make conversation, you start to notice the wonderful sound of someone’s laugh, you start to admire someone’s work ethic. And before you know it, that’s the way you start looking at yourself, too. Layered and multidimensional. You’re not just a pretty face and a body. You possess the qualities you admire in others, and if not, you possess the ability to develop them. Beauty is something you can always redefine, and it’s inherently something you are.