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The Goldfinch, Carel Fabritius 1654, The Mauritshuis, Den Haag ..

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"old friends" is an underrated relationship dynamic because it's such an innocent boring sounding term for what is usually some of the wildest shit imaginable. it's always like 'oh yeah we go way back, we have history' and then you find out that history includes sex, drugs, murder, divorce, war crimes and The Incident

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a sick day in antwerp

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Take it or leave it

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"Her gust of laughter had a self-propelling recklessness I knew all too well from wild nights with Boris, an edge of giddiness and hysteria that I associated (in myself, anyway) with having narrowly missed death."

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Anxiety-inducing asshole

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But what does the painting say about Fabritius himself? Nothing about religious or romantic or familial devotion; nothing about civic awe or career ambition or respect for wealth and power. There’s only a tiny heartbeat and solitude, bright sunny wall and a sense of no escape. Time that doesn’t move, time that couldn’t be called time. And trapped in the heart of light: the little prisoner, unflinching. I think of something I read about Sargent: how, in portraiture, Sargent always looked for the animal in the sitter (a tendency that, once I knew to look for it, I saw everywhere in his work: in the long foxy noses and pointed ears of Sargent’s heiresses, in his rabbit-toothed intellectuals and leonine captains of industry, his plump owl-faced children). And, in this staunch little portrait, it’s hard not to see the human in the finch. Dignified, vulnerable. One prisoner looking at another.

But who knows what Fabritius intended? There’s not enough of his work left to even make a guess. The bird looks out at us. It’s not idealized or humanized. It’s very much a bird. Watchful, resigned. There’s no moral or story. There’s no resolution. There’s only a double abyss: between painter and imprisoned bird; between the record he left of the bird and our experience of it, centuries later.

And yes—scholars might care about the innovative brushwork and use of light, the historical influence and the unique significance in Dutch art. But not me. As my mother said all those years ago, my mother who loved the painting only from seeing it in a book she borrowed from the Comanche County Library as a child: the significance doesn’t matter. The historical significance deadens it. Across those unbridgeable distances—between bird and painter, painting and viewer—I hear only too well what’s being said to me, a psst from an alleyway as Hobie put it, across four hundred years of time, and it’s really very personal and specific. It’s there in the light-rinsed atmosphere, the brush strokes he permits us to see, up close, for exactly what they are—hand worked flashes of pigment, the very passage of the bristles visible—and then, at a distance, the miracle, or the joke as Horst called it, although really it’s both, the slide of transubstantiation where paint is paint and yet also feather and bone. It’s the place where reality strikes the ideal, where a joke becomes serious and anything serious is a joke. The magic point where every idea and its opposite are equally true.

The Goldfinch, 2013

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Hey, it’s a stupid rule, no dogs on the bus.

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after-amsterdam <3

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Me! You have me!

Oakes Fegley and Finn Wolfhard as THEODORE DECKER and BORIS PAVLIKOVSKY in THE GOLDFINCH (2019) dir. John Crowley.

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people act like boreo is problematic but really there’s nothing wrong with their relationship just with them separately as people lmao. at least that’s how I feel. they genuinely love and care for each other

(This is super late sry) While I do wholeheartedly agree that they have a lot of love for each other and genuinely care about each other’s well being, I also personally wouldn’t say their relationship is completely healthy or unproblematic either because, technically, there are a lot of undeniable issues there. The both of them have trouble reconciling their own identity and attraction (theo especially) and that lack of forward communication and acceptance is often at the heart of a lot of the pain and tension between them. If they were to continue on the way they left off in the book (with no further progress or development) I just don’t see them ever getting together in an actual stable relationship, one that would equally benefit both of them. Just like in Vegas, their individual mental health issues and unresolved trauma would inevitably cause further trouble and misunderstanding, bouts of jealousy and definitely a lapse into old vices. I mean, we left off with Boris shooting up and Theo still standing on the other side of a self-imposed chasm, wanting to connect but not knowing how and still too distanced from the repressed part of himself to even go about trying. I think it would take a lot of therapy, honesty, and deep introspection before they could ever enter a truly healthy relationship, but based on their firm and undetrred connection to each other, I do think it’s entirely possible at some point down the line, which is why I still see them as a perfectly valid pairing. 

And even despite all of that (and despite what some ppl want you to believe) there’s still nothing wrong with shipping them as they are in the novel (remember, it’s just that, a novel). For all that they’ve been through their relationship is raw and realistic, layered and incredibly complex, which it should be. These things don’t mean that their connection to each other should be shunned or disregarded, it just is what it is. There are plenty of people experiencing circumstances just like this or close to it, and it doesn’t mean that their feelings aren’t real or acceptable. Reality is messy and painful and not always problem-free and I’m actually really glad Tartt decided to be true to it rather than polish it up for the sake of a happy ending/conventionally-acceptable pairing. 

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Finn Wolfhard as BORIS PAVLIKOVSKY in THE GOLDFINCH (2019) dir. John Crowley.

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“i can fix him” i can steal his painting.

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new a little life / the goldfinch parallel dropped