Sarah Perry, The Essence Of Peopling

musings on may

Franz Kafka Diaries, 1914-1923 | Felix Vallotton, The Dordogne with Carrenac (1925) | Vera Brittain, “Because You Died: Poetry and Prose of the First World War and After” | Jin Xingye | Haruki Murakami, "Norwegian Wood" | Jin Xingye

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An Old Woman of the Roads, by Pádraic Colum

Oh, to have a little house! To own the hearth and stool and all! The heaped up sods upon the fire, The pile of turf against the wall!

To have a clock with weights and chains And pendulum swinging up and down! A dresser filled with shining delph, Speckled and white and blue and brown!

I could be busy all the day Clearing and sweeping hearth and floor, And fixing on their shelf again My white and blue and speckled store!

I could be quiet there at night Beside the fire and by myself, Sure of a bed and loth to leave The ticking clock and the shining delph!

Och! but I am weary of mist and dark, And roads where there’s never a house nor bush, And tired I am of bog and road, And the crying wind and the lonesome hush!

And I am praying to God on high, And I am praying Him night and day, For a little house - house of my own - Out of the wind’s and the rain’s way.

Anaïs Nin, from the diary of Anais Nin, vol. VI: 1955-1966

Sergei Efron, from a letter to Max Voloshin, referring to Marina Tsvetaeva, featured in Earthly Signs, Moscow Diaries

Seduction is a skill everybody needs to learn and apply.

Seduction is a high form of power, by making people excited about the idea of you and the reducing the resistance to the things you want.

The more seduced a person is = the higher the chance you are able to get what you desire.

In romance, in business, in life.

Athenais by John William Godward (1908)

Increase and widen your desires till nothing but reality can fulfill them. It is not desired that is wrong, but its narrowness and smallness. Desire is devotion. By all means be devoted to the real, the infinite, the eternal heart of being. Transform desire into love. All you want is to be happy. All your desires, whatever they may be, are expressions of your longing for happiness. Basically, you wish yourself well

- Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

I shall live on dreams because reality is too cruel for me. I think I shall be the kind of person that nobody understands,

Anaïs Nin, Linotte: The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1914-1920

“I like people whose beauty entails something individually captivating; People whose beauty is as pure as tears. Oh how glorious the human heart can be! How terrifying, if it is also linked to the soul (for the heart alone does nothing for me). This idea of the “soul” perpetually haunts me. I keep wondering whether I can altogether love people in case the idea of the soul remains forever an open question to me. I don’t know if what I call “the soul” exists or not but if it does, I imagine it as a slowly dying ember. I imagine it as something dark, tormented and disgustingly gorgeous.”

— Anaïs Nin, Anaïs Nin’s Lost World: Paris In Words And Pictures (via violentwavesofemotion)