virgodura:
sespursongles:
And speaking of Sophia Tolstoy, her diaries are just so depressing. “I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats the milk, knits a blanket, makes little requests and bustles about trying not to think […].“ She wrote this when she was 19, one year into her marriage to Leo and as she was pregnant with the first of his 13 children.
A few years later, when she was 25 or so:
“I am so often alone with my thoughts that the need to write in my diary comes quite naturally … Now I am well again and not pregnant—it terrifies me how often I have been in that condition. He said that for him being young meant “I can achieve anything”. For me […] reason tells me that there is nothing I either want or can do beyond nursing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and loving and caring for my husband and babies, all of which I know is happiness of a kind, but why do I feel so woeful all the time, and weep as I did yesterday? I am writing this now with the pleasantly exciting sense that nobody will ever read it, so I can be quite frank with myself […].“
During her 12th pregnancy she wrote about taking scalding baths and jumping from high pieces of furniture to try and miscarry. And at one point while reading her husband’s diary (which he told her to read) she found the sentence “There is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.” In her own diary she wrote “They ebb and flow like waves, these times when I realise how lonely I am and want only to cry…”
A few years before her husband’s death, she published a cycle of prose poems titled “Groans”, under the pseudonym “A Tired Woman”.
the most depressing quote from her diaries:
“I have served a genius for almost forty years. Hundreds of times I have felt my intellectual energy stir within me and all sorts of desires - a longing for education, a love of music and the arts… And time and again I have crushed and smothered these longings… Everyone asks, “But why should a worthless woman like you need an intellectual or artistic life?” To this question I can only reply: “I don’t know, but eternally suppressing it to serve a genius is a great misfortune.”
featureshoot: ift.tt/2zP014W the eyes of Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk, humanitarian, and photographer:
nowness: Color Problems—A Book by Emily Noyes Vanderpoel Sacred Bones and Circadian Press republish a 118 year old color manual by a lost female pioneer of color theory, Emily Noyes Vanderpoel.
taishou-kun: s-h-o-w-a:
A young couple takes a selfie on a self-timer on their camera, Japan, 1959 Ph. John Dominis
John Dominis (1921-2013) A young couple takes a selfie on a self-timer on their camera, Japan, 1959, from “Japanese Love Story” series
New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings. — Lao Tzu (via quotemadness)
paperhound: Don’t dog-ear your page. Dog-ear the dog’s ear. That’s right: we’ve been Paper Hounding for five years and we’re marking the anniversary with a mark. Specifically, a flat, basic bookmark that folds into a three-dimensional canine who sits up and stares coyly over his shoulder at you, dear reader, as he fiercely guards your place. There are dotted lines to guide you. It’s easy. So you dog-ear the dog’s ear. Then crease along his collar (origamists will recognise this as a valley fold), crease in the other direction (a mountain fold) diagonally along his centre, then one more fold at his base. These bookmarks were a rad collaboration with our customer Amir Mohtasebi. Follow him on Instagram, buy his prints, congratulate him on being an illustration genius if you meet him on the street. And congratulate yourselves for being great supporters of brick-and-mortar bookselling in an age of corporate retail homogeneity and the razing of quirky independent spaces. We’re so happy to be bookmarking this place in our history (but trust us, this is just the first chapter and it’s gonna be a long book).
It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilites of truth between us. — Adrienne Rich, from On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978.
(via xshayarsha)
exit152:if ur feeling desperately sad this summer, wait until it gets dark and half quiet and then open a window. cool air and passing cars are gonna heal ur heart. i promise
