Margaret Atwood, Morning in the Burned House; from ‘Sekhmet, The Lion-Headed Goddess of War, Violent Storms, Pestilence, and Recovery From Illness, Contemplates the Desert in The Metropolitan Museum of Art'
selected diaries, virginia woolf / abandonment (the pair), henri de toulouse-lautrec / pillow thoughts, courtney peppernell / in bed, henri de toulouse-lautrec / work song, hozier / the two friends, henri de toulouse-lautrec / portrait of a lady on fire (2019), dir. céline sciamma
that I have never loved you, not even now, not tomorrow.
In this way, I can begin to love you again and again
because there is no past. This is the way the moon
unbuttons the stars as it passes overhead.
The way even the most distant galaxies continue to tug on us.
This is the way I love you.
i wasn't capable of loving and yet i loved to love
// i was looking for what i could love, loving love, and i despised surety and a path free of danger
// it was all because i was hungry from within, for more internal foods, for you
// for if the senses had no soul they would not be so loved. to love and be loved was sweet to me
// indeed i fell in love, and i was yearning to be trapped by it. my God, my Compassion, with how much poison you inflicted that charm on me with all your goodness. because i was loved
- confessions, aurelius augustinius hipponensis (saint augustine)
Camus: If someone here told me to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page I should write: “I recognize only one duty, and that is to love.” And, as far as everything else is concerned, I say no.
“…he fatally wounded me; that is, he gave me the wound that only love could repair.”
— Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping
the heavenly devotion in Adonis’ “change the face of the moon, for my beloved’s face is no longer there”
“I thirst for each little feather of your lashes and I fear your closeness as ruin.”
Nikolay Punin, from a letter to Anna Akhmatova wr. c. February 1926