"tenuous at best" was all he had to say.
Aug 10
Jul 18
“ To die will be an awfully big adventure… I’m youth, I’m joy, I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.
—
“Peter Pan or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up” J.M. Barrie
Ah, in love with this play.
May 27
“ The first woman may have been Eve, but the first girl will always be Alma… Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling someone’s hair. And a part of you was drawn to her, and a part of you resisted - wanting to ride off on your bicycle, kick a stone, remain uncomplicated. In the same breath you felt the strength of a man, and a self-pity that made you feel small and hurt. Part of you thought: Please don’t look at me. If you don’t, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me.
—
The History of Love (Nicole Krauss)
Everyone read it. Seriously.
May 05
“ This circle represents people who are breaking my heart, and this circle represents people who are shaking my confidence daily. And where they overlap… Cecilia.
— Marshall (How I Met Your Mother)
Apr 08
“ It had always been of the greatest importance to him… that nothing should change at his place of work, that everything should remain as it was, as he had arranged it, and that nothing further should be added by the debris generated by painting and the dust that continuously fell and which, as he was coming to realise, he loved more than anything else in the world. He felt closer to the dust, he said, than to light, air or water.
—
“The Emigrants” - Max Ferber
W.G. Sebald
Mar 29
“
IV. DEATH BY WATER
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
—
- T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”
I now have an abhorred hatred of this man, Phlebas. Upon the realisation that he is not, in fact, a reference to The Odyssey NOR The Aeneid, a good 40 minutes of what could’ve been used to write this essay were wasted finding him in the texts aforementioned. He was in neither. A guy drowns in The Aeneid. His name isn’t Phlebas. I was lied to.
Mar 25
“ Today, I repaired a boiler for a wealthy guy in a big house. While there, I fixed a leaking tap for free. When I went to go, the man slipped something into my shirt pocket and said “have a drink on me.” When I got to my truck, I discovered that he’d given me a tea bag. FML
— FMyLife.com
Mar 11
“ ‘Bad men have no songs’. - How is it the Russians have songs?
— Friedrich Nietzsche: “Twilight of the Idols”
W.E.B. Du Bois
This thing is rather odd, and I’m unsure what it really does. But it cannot be less odd than Twitter, which I still do not understand.
I’m in the middle of reading (as is the usual in the Foundation Year Programme), this time The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois. Published in 1903, this beautifully written work is pretty much blowing my mind away. I may love me some Nietzsche, with him being an asshole to the world and all, but this guy is just such a contrast to read.
“The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, - this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.
This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of the body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten.” (Du Bois, 3)
Sigh.
Honestly, these things just reflect on our everyday lives. What is Obama than a true combination of those two histories?
I have a feeling this blog might simply be filled with FYP quotes.
