sheetsandstatesmilesaway

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I love women who are unabashedly big.

Women with big laughs, big smiles, big voices, big bodies, and even bigger personalities to match. Women that don’t care if they take up space with long strides and sit with their legs miles apart.

They give big hugs and big kisses, and they have big hearts. Big, proud women are amazing.

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In Orwell’s essay “A Hanging,” the writer watches the condemned man, walking toward the gallows, swerve to avoid a puddle. For Orwell, this represents precisely what he calls the “mystery” of the life that is about to be taken: when there is no good reason for it, the condemned man is still thinking about keeping his shoes clean. It is an “irrelevant” act (and a marvelous bit of noticing on Orwell’s part). Now suppose this were not an essay but a piece of fiction. And indeed there has been a fair amount of speculation about the proportion of fact to fiction in such essays of Orwell’s. 

The avoidance of the puddle would be precisely the kind of superb detail that, say, Tolstoy might flourish; War and Peace has an execution scene very close in spirit to Orwell’s essay, and it may well be that Orwell basically cribbed the detail from Tolstoy. In War and Peace, Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight. The avoidance of the puddle, the fiddling with the blindfold—these are what might be called irrelevant or superfluous details. They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the “effects” of realism, of “realistic” style. 

But Orwell’s essay, assuming it records an actual occurrence, shows us that such fictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself (…) There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness. 

— JAMES WOOD, from How Fiction Works.

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“I don’t think existence wants you to be serious. I have not seen a serious tree. I have not seen a serious bird. I have not seen a serious sunrise. I have not seen a serious starry night. It seems they are all laughing in their own ways, dancing in their own ways. We may not understand it, but there is a subtle feeling that the whole existence is a celebration.”

— Osho (via feelingisthesecret)

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believe that you are what you want to be. —neville goddard

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Benjamin Alire Saenz, The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

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Rusalka (1996) — Mermaid by Aleksandr Petrov

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when e.e. cummings said “i’ll live my life if it kills me”

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If you must die, I'll envy the earth

That wraps around your body.

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-what we love, we mention-

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Susan Sontag, I, etcetera: Stories  

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https://www.instagram.com/p/BdbcXZDlJ6S/

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Paolo Sebastian ‘Persephone’ Spring 2021 Haute Couture Collection

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Paolo Sebastian Fall 2017 Haute Couture Collection

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Paolo Sebastian ‘Persephone’ Spring 2021 Haute Couture Collection