Lilacs After Rain

i think we as modern humans have a tendency to forget that historical people were also humans who had thoughts and feelings and dreams just like we do

www.instillmotion.co

Lament for the Rohirrim, J.R.R. Tolkien

Do you ever think about how many of the items now considered priceless artifacts were once commonplace items? The coins we now marvel at from behind the glass at a museum were once tossed around, stepped on, and traded around. The pottery painstakingly pieced back together was somebody’s favorite wine jug. The decorative pin now rusted and bent once held together the shoulder of someone’s chiton. History is simply a trail of ordinary people going about their day, and I think there’s an odd sort of beauty in that.

"I wish I had done everything on earth with you."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

-Painting by Ron Hicks

“That is the way I want to write—rich and rhythmic—heavy, sonorous prose that befits those mythic ambiguities that are both source and structure to an aesthetic experience symbolized by language—”

— Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

also a poem from the new, unreleased collection. very possibly my own all-time favourite.

'people have always been people' goes for simple human compassion & humor but only if it also means understanding that historical people have always been as complex and nuanced and innovative as they are now. their food and clothing and language and tools, particularly of ordinary people, however different than you're used to, should not be assumed to represent cultural inferiority or that those people had inferior tastes or intelligence or capacity for feeling than you do

Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Lytton Strachey, featured in The Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf