sadsongbird

[sadsongbird]

https://www.instagram.com/p/C_e7C_ghRGm

[sadsongbird]

Period drama + Reading

NORTHANGER ABBEY (2007)

COLETTE(2018)

BRIGHT STAR (2009)

MR. MALCOLM'S LIST(2022)

ANNE OF GREEN GABLES (1985)

EMMA. (2020)

BECOMING JANE (2007)

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Virginia Woolf, in a diary entry dated 27 February 1926, from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III: 1925-1930

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words

One day you think: I want to die. And then you think, very quietly, actually I want a coffee. I want a nap. A sandwich. A book. And I want to die turns day by day into I want to go home, I want to walk in the woods, I want to see my friends, I want to sit in the sun. I want a cleaner room, I want a better job, I want to live somewhere else, I want to live.

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it’s okay to say ‘this isn’t for me’ or ‘I’m not happy here’ and leave… you don’t have to wait for things to be really bad

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embarrassment has good bones

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I'm in a very Pre-Raphaelite mood lately 💘

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Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Between the World and Me

Text ID: The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free.

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Emily Dickinson, from a letter to F.S. Cooper written c. February 1876

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if you want to experience life more deeply you have to find more beauty. stop training yourself to dismiss, to mock, to assume the worst all the time — when you do this you build walls between yourself and the world. and after a while you stop feeling the warmth of it entirely.

beauty requires openness. it asks you to let things reach you, to soften enough to be moved. it’s not naive to see beauty everywhere—it’s a skill, a form of intelligence, a kind of quiet bravery. because it is so much easier to critique than to create, to detach than to engage, to dismiss than to love.

let yourself be affected. let yourself find things beautiful and let that be enough. life is not asking you to be cool, sitting on the sidelines and nitpicking everything. it’s asking you to see life and experience it fully.

[sadsongbird]

February Mood

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Preparations for the season of love & a tiny shrine for Aphrodite 💝

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“Saint Valentine is past. Lovers, to bed; ‘tis almost fairy time.”

— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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upstream, mary oliver; gravity and grace, simone weil; journal of a solitude, may sarton

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When Cleopatra welcomed Mark Antony to her bedroom, the floor was covered in a foot and a half of such petals. Did they use the floor, and make love in a swamp of soft, fragrant, shimmying petals? Or did they use the bed, as if they were on a raft floating in a scented ocean?

Cleopatra knew her guest. Few people have been as obsessed with roses as the ancient Romans. Roses were strewn at public ceremonies and banquets; rose water bubbled through the emperor’s fountains and the public baths surged with it; in the public amphitheaters, crowds sat under sun awnings steeped in rose perfume; rose petals were used as pillow stuffings; people wore garlands of roses in their hair; they ate rose pudding; their medicines, love potions, and aphrodisiacs all contained roses. No bacchanalia, the Romans’ official orgy, was complete without an excess of roses. They created a holiday, Rosalia, to formally consummate their passion for the flower. At one banquet, Nero had silver pipes installed under each plate, so that guests could be spritzed with scent between courses. They could admire a ceiling painted to resemble the celestial heavens, which would open up and shower them in a continuous rain of perfume and flowers. At another, he spent the equivalent of $160,000 just on roses—and one of his guests smothered to death under a shower of rose petals.

— Diane Ackerman, ‘Smell: Roses’ A Natural History of the Senses

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Salma Deera, "Salt"