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“The modern man is in favour of introducing order into everything except in his own ideas.”

- G.K. Chesterton

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It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction.

-Roger Scruton

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“The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of life, but that it bothers him less and less.”

- Vaclav Havel

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IN SOCIETIES dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

THE IMAGES detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomised images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.

THE SPECTACLE presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is the focal point of all vision and all consciousness. But due to the fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.

THE SPECTACLE is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.  

—Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

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Tumblr is a fate driven website. You can't find posts through the search function, you see them when you're meant to.

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Giuseppe Calì's 'Woman Carried by the Sea'

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“A tiny moon as small and white as a single jasmine flower / Leans all alone above my window,”

— D.H. Lawrence, from Selected Poems; “A White Blossom”

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“Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.”

— Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime

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Antique Chinese Porcelain Vases and Jars

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Sometimes you read a line from a book and it’s like something from your own head or something from your journal. And that part of you is a bit more defined, a bit sharper, and a bit easier to understand and explain to others.

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...she cherished a profound admiration for other people. To be them would be marvellous, but she was condemned to be herself and could only in this silent enthusiastic way, sitting outside in a garden, applaud the society of humanity from which she was excluded. Tags of poetry in praise of them rose to her lips; they were adorable and good, above all courageous, triumphers over night and fens, the survivors, the company of adventurers who, set about with dangers, sail on.

— A Summing Up by Virginia Woolf.

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Virginia Woolf's ability to replicate human mind so accurately is the reason why she is one of the best English authors of all time. The depiction of how the human mind constantly fluctuates between the past and present, transcending the boundaries of the physical world in her Mrs Dalloway is eerily familiar to our own experiences. And it's mesmerizing to read To The Lighthouse and realise, like in real life, every character seems to know every other character so deeply, yet not know them at all.

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Carl Friedrich Seiffert: The Blue Grotto on Capri (1860)

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Thomas Cole  (1801–1848)

Expulsion. Moon and Firelight

ca. 1828

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btw archive dot org is SUCH a treasury when it comes to out-of-print poetry anthologies… i am having the time of my life, truly ❣️

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