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Finality.

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I couldn't visit Manchester without doing a library tour

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II - IRREDEEMABLE (Ispravimaya)

I had been birthed unwillingly—you brought me forth to a world cold and cruel, to a world in which I never belonged. From my inception, we were irreconcilable, forever opposed, beyond forgiveness. When you looked upon me, it was not with love and mellow contemplation, but with strife and hatred. You had branded me as evil long before, as the thing against god and earth alike, as the one who walked with wrath and destruction, as the one who could never be understood, never be loved, never be accepted. —from 'La Sirene', an anthology by C. Verkhoyanskov, 2020

Translations: Ispravimaya (Old Slavic) - an irredeemable woman.

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By Greg Mort

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@academia-lucifer

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May 25, 1926 Journals of Anais Nin 1923-1927[volume 3]

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Temple of Apollo, Portara, Naxos, Greece

Credit: Athan Andreas

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I - WHITE NIGHTS

I lived in a land far away…in the land of the white nights…of hazy skies…of black forests…in isolation…far away…far away…on the nightingale’s breath sang my laments, to the ears of no one, to never be heard… I was a dreamer but only of nightmares…in a world where the night never ended, a world of white on black, a world in the snow-covered forest, a world drifting, impossibly far away… About my neck was the crimson stain, the stain of my failure…of my defeat…for all to see…about my neck was the scarlet ribbon I had carried with me all my life…the scarlet ribbon which bound me to my suffering… I no longer walked free…I was bound, entrapped, encased in a world of torment…I lurked, I lingered…lingered in the shadows, never to be seen, never to be heard… Crystalline tears, tears of crimson — are they really so different? What is one to the other but not the natural continuation of a soul broken? The white nights haunted me…taunted me…for despite their beauty they destroyed me…I could never leave… I had always dreamed of having the crimson ribbon ripped from my neck and set ablaze…ablaze to light the night…or perhaps it was I who deserved to be set ablaze and light the night with my death… Was it so that I lived in a fantastical world of strife mellowed with reason? My god did not love me…with only the sighing echo of the balalaika to keep me sane I had to ponder…to inquire of him…why, oh Rod, had you trapped me here? What had I done to deserve this…what had I done… I begged, I had begged all my life, for this crucial answer, only never to be answered…never to be quelled… I begged of him to take me…to take me home…to remove me from the land of the white nights…of the black forest…snow and ice… There had come a point…long ago…when I lost my fear of death…yet I had become irreparably fearful of life… There was no heaven to be seen beyond the grave, beyond the veil of death, but this place…this place was most certainly hell… I had been condemned for my failings, my failings in this life and in the life before and the life before…I had been the instrument of my own destruction…unknowingly I dropped the curtain of the white night over my own head…I had woven my fate in blindness… Sighing echo, so sweet and so beautiful…sighing echo of a land far away…have you ever heard a sound so beautiful it broke your heart?

—from 'La Sirene', an anthology by C. Verkhoyanskov, 2020

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~ James Sant, Portrait of the 17th Countess of Rothes (detail)

via bonhams

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Tried to just romanticize my life by reading books but it got too serious that I had to get a bookshelf ✉︎

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Athens, Greece 1860/70

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Skull (1887) by Vincent van Gogh

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My collection of old books:

Mary Poppins in the Park (1965 edition); P. L Travers / Analysis of English History (1908 edition); C. W. A. Tait / Our Mutal Friend (1935? edition); Charles Dickens / The Unlit Lamp (1929? edition); Radclyffe Hall

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“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”

– Anna Quindlen