#reading the book of letters

[moongazeonastarfillednight]

Thinking about James Fitzjames sharing with Elizabeth C. the letters he received from these little girls to show off their penmanships and express how much it touched him to receive them 🥺

And little Fanny be all: "Frostbitten toes be upon thee!"

God, children are magical and that's the most precious thing I've ever read.

[shisasan]

16 April, 1939 Letters to Véra by Vladimir Nabokov

[loveelizabeths]

love elizabeth s.

[scriptastra]

[learnelle]

My uni semester is done done done ! I received my good results, so I can finally exhale. My friends and I reread the Bell Jar and went to see the Dead Poet’s Society in theatre, and it was SO nice to think about something other than my uni assignments ☕️

[insatiablexi]

[skyrigel]

You're my home. You're my religion. And when you smile all heaven sparks with joy, my heart wants to crawl out of my ribs and be home with you.

[ffcrazy15]

There's this way of doing female-ness in Christianity that I call "pastel flower journal Christianity." I've got nothing against pastel flower journals per se, but for some reason people believe it's the end all and be all of female spirituality, and I think it's a real disservice towards young Christian women.

One of these days I'd like to start a prayer-and-reading group or something for young women, but there would be no floral themes or over-focus on how "God thinks you're beautiful even if the world doesn't" (a true statement, but it's wayyyyy too often the focus in women's spiritual reading). Instead we would be reading:

Seneca's Letters from a Stoic

Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning

Sheed's A Map of Life

Portions of Pieper's book on leisure

Kreeft's Three Philosophies of Life

Guardini's The Lord (or something similar)

Therese's Story of a Soul

and some select portions of the Nicomachean Ethics.

(Also they're all getting the porn talk. I don't know why we give the porn talk to young men but not young women. There's this idea that women don't use porn and they only need the talk about "guarding their heart." Bullshit. There's porn on the YA shelves of Barnes and Nobles and before that there were bodice rippers. Young women need the porn talk too.)

Every young woman needs to be getting a basic grounding in virtue ethics, logic, natural law, scholastic philosophy and Biblical hermeneutics if they're going to get by in today's spiritual landscape. Enough faffery and emotionalism in young women's spiritual education! Give them real food to chew on, not pasty sentimentalism!

[fictionadventurer]

I love libraries.

I'm browsing the WWI shelves (as you do) and notice a very old book about the war. I glance at the first pages that talk about how one day the war will be over and we'll look at this place and not see any signs of the battlefield.

Then it hits me. And I check the publishing date.

This book was printed before the war's end. Not written. Printed. The physical object was created in 1918, while the war in question was raging and the end was as yet uncertain.

Now I'm standing on the other side of the apocalypse, with this physical link to that era in my hands. I'm living proof that the war did end and life did go on and we can all look at the end of the world as a long-ago memory.

Reading old books is cool enough, connecting our minds and hearts through the ideas of people who lived long ago, but there's something extra profound about holding a copy of the book that comes from the time that it was written. It's a physical link between the past and the present connecting me to those long-ago people. A piece of the past come into the future that gives me the chance to almost take the hand of some long-ago reader, to hold something they could have held, connecting not just mentally but physically to their era, a moment of connection across more than a century.

Excuse me while I go weep.

[moonlight-dove]

"You wouldn't believe the kind of person I could become if you wanted it."

- Franz Kafka, Letters To Felice

[moongazeonastarfillednight]

Were none of you going to tell me that the Goodsirs dog, Caesar, which Harry tried to bring aboard, was an itty bitty tiny Scot Terrier?

Omg Harry what were you thinking, sweet summer child 😭

[shisasan]

22 January, 1973 Letters to Véra by Vladimir Nabokov

[loveelizabeths]

- 𝚕𝚘𝚟𝚎 𝚎𝚕𝚒𝚣𝚊𝚋𝚎𝚝𝚑 𝚜.

[scriptastra]

[evieliciousblog]

craving autumn like it’s my long lost love who’s gone off to war ✉︎

[insatiablexi]

franz kafka i love you