#aspirant geologist

[sushi11]

Happy geologist day🤠

[ribbondee]

I really love rocks.

I used to bring them home when I was little.

Be they the prettiest gem or dullest stone, rock is rock. All rocks are valid.

[weneedatdcharacterwho]

We need multiple sciency characters in one cast but they all focus on completely different narrow fields and a separate non-sciency camper can’t get it through their head that liking science doesn’t mean liking every area of science so they keep asking the aspiring geologist how to code and the marine biologist about butterfly species identification

.

[bisexual-kaidan-alenko]

My dash is feeling a liiiiittle empty rn and I'm looking for more blogs to follow and possibly become friends with!

Hi! I'm Reynir but you can call me Rey, I'm 29 years old bisexual trans man from Iceland. I'm an aspiring geologist and I love collecting rocks and crystals!

So if you are into these

- Dragon Age

- Mass Effect

- Baldur's Gate 3/Dungeons and Dragons

- World of Warcraft

- Video Games

- Evil Dead (Haven't seen the new movie yet so I'm kind of indifferent about it)

- AEW (I might have a mild thing for Kenny Omega lol)

- WWE (I'm not into it as much as I used to but I'm kind of watching snippets of The Judgement Day Seth Rollins/Sami Zayn feud)

[fleeting-sanity]

Birb Avion Family Portrait

I made two potat family portraits but none for them shame shame... Anyways this is my OG family, everyone is an OC except for Jaesa. Their ages are all 25 since obviously.... uhm, some of them are dead.

Individual short bio under read more!

Rionnic Avion / Aevrel Valius Panteer / Xarethe

Class : Sith Warrior Weapon : Dual Lightsabers

hahahhaha he's the only sith in the fam just a tired boi enabling his twin brother escaping responsibilities by taking on all of those leadership roles when all he wanted was a quiet life with his lil family divorced from the chaotic galaxy. loves to sing SECRETLY, be a clingy dad, compose poems and music, write research journals, and watches musical events. emo variant of emperor's wrath.

Riornivo Avion

Class : Jedi Consular Weapon : Lightsaber

too kind and caring to a fault. stubborn like his twin in the flavor of not wanting to learn that sometimes helping people needed to be in moderation and can lead to its own repercussions. loves to knit, cook, garden, teach, and clean. boo-boo the fool variant of the barsen'thor.

Vyria Avion

Class : Jedi Knight Weapon : Lightsaber

third stubborn, twice brash sister. likes beating up enemies with fists and soles. then you'll get her actually using her lightsaber. often spats and spars with eldest brother. bubbly, loud, and opinionated. loves to exercise, window shopping, swim, and dance.

Jaesa Willsaam

Class : I'd say she's a... Consular Weapon : Double-bladed Lightsaber

LS version. no master-apprentice dynamics between the two as they are equal. became more self-assured and decisive as she got older. loves to take walks, forage, sew outfits, and record daily footages.

Vianiel Avion

Class : Jedi Knight Weapon : Dual Lightsabers

a shy archeologist. she's more proficient in sabers than the force, spends most time on artifacts and crystals. very tragic mom, but the most resilient and compassionate. left the jedi order on her own accord after a tragedy. loves to cook, read literary works, sparring, and crafts crystal accessories. died during the dread war :(

Jurbiend Pendraig

Class : Jedi Consular Weapon : Double-bladed Lightsaber

a no nonsense jedi master. quite arrogant and unorthodox. his expertise on trakata is controversial amongst his fellow jedi, but challenge him on why it's wrong and you'll earn a debate table. skilled fighter pilot, callsign is "vision" as he likes to take out enemies out of their line of sight. loves to theorycraft, deep research, explore force techniques, and crafts lightsabers. died after the dread war :(

Enzaran Avion

Class : Smuggler Weapon : Blaster Pistols, Sniper Rifles, Assault Rifles, Scalpels, Ropes, Scattergun, Vibroknives, Poison Darts, Grenades

your typical fuckboi. quite rich from all the criminal activities he been doing, but hides his wealth somewhere. also hides his force-sensitivity somehow. one of the smugglers in hylo's brigade of ending the mandalorian blockade in hydian way. uses the force to cheat, crimes, charm, con, and cope. loves to gamble, frolick on grass fields, garden something weird, and traveling.

Eniriva Avion

Class : Bounty Hunter Weapon : Blaster Pistols, Assault Rifles, Grenade Launcher, Electronet, Missile Launcher, Flamethrower

distant and quiet, unlike her dad. her keeping the distance from her family was partly due to her line of job. her cousins are actually accepting of her, and fortunately it wasn't too late for them to get closer to each other. loves sports, code programming, tinkering with gadgets, and practice shooting.

Rian Avion

Class : Jedi Knight Weapon : Lightsaber

aspiring geologist & archeologist. perhaps his fascination with rocks was inherited from late grandma. generally a chill dude, not interested in arguing why he's got a sith dad--'sif he can change that, but he knows that he cant just fill his life with what he's passionate about; there be responsibilities. loves spelunking, tomb exploring (read: NOT raiding), watching documentaries, hiking, and gardening.

[potionboy3]

For the au thingy, post apocalyptic au?

twyla brindlemroe | post apocalyptic au

twyla brindlemore is an aspiring geologist who learns of a new type of neutrino from a solar flare that seems to be heating the earth's core...

15 years later the world as we know it no longer exists. twyla is raising her teenage son  alone after losing her husband lincoln when a mega tsunami hit their home town. she's leading a group of other survivors as they're trying to adjust to the ever changing nature of their home planet.

one day another group of survivors makes their existence known. twyla's son goes missing and her group gets ready for a fight of survival.

they find the other group and her son who has quickly made friends with the leader of the group. twyla is shocked to find out that the leader is her own husband.

will they reunite and join their groups or will she have to choose between her family and her new found community?

tagging @cursebreakerfarrier who lincoln belongs to. also i used the same kid from *this* post for this story since i needed a kid (:

[the-haunted-office]

Doomsday has had a lot to think about, ascending these stairs, and a lot of time in which to think, because time here feels as endless as both her thoughts and these stairs. For as much as she marches upwards, her thoughts do too, although her thoughts aren't always moving in an upward direction.

Sometimes they move laterally. Sometimes they spiral, like the stairs, but downward. Actually, that's mostly what they do. That's normal, for her. She comes by it naturally. It's easy to do when your whole life has felt like it's been slowly circling around a drain, even if you never seem to actually reach the drain. It's like going into that black hole, except... now she finally has.

(Cut here due to length!!)

And here she is, in this place, inside the drain, and her thoughts are still moving.

Is this what she's supposed to be doing in this place?

The Narrative told her she needs to choose to live or die. She doesn't want to die, not really, but... she's never really wanted to live either.

It always boils down to this - this... indecision about her life and what to make of it. Some people have it figured it out so easily, seemingly from such a young age knowing exactly what they want to do, exactly how to get it, having the exact tools to get them there, and the exact motivation and encouragement and spirit to get it all. They go out there and just do it and get it all.

Not Doomsday. Not Thursday. Not Charlotte.

She remembers how things used to be, as Charlotte. Having the energy and ambition to believe she could be whatever she wanted. Oh, she had so many plans and ideas for herself. She wanted to be a veterinarian. A teacher. A therapist. A psychologist. A paleontologist. A geologist. A volcanologist. An astrophysicist. An archaeologist. An author. An artist. So many things. So many dreams. So many aspirations.

All of them crushed by a few, simple letters on her report card, and a few simple words from her parents.

We expect better of you.

All her hard work. Her best efforts. The best she had to put out into the world. None of that meant anything to anyone. All it meant was B's and C's on her report card, and all that meant to her parents was "not good enough". Especially compared to her brothers, whose B's and C's meant "exceeded their expectations".

It all slipped away from her then. All those ambitions of hers. She still put in as good an effort as she thought she could do, but it was only enough to get by, and after that it was just... entering the workforce. Like everybody else. Getting by. Existing.

And then she died.

And the rest was history.

And now here she is.

And she has to choose whether or not she wants to live or die again.

What a bunch of stupid fucking bullshit.

She never wanted to do any of this, if she's being honest. In fact, if she could make any choice at all, she'd choose to have never been born at all, thus sparing her from having to even make any of these choices to begin with. That would be a whole lot easier and would have saved her all the grief along the way.

Grief. That's all her life has been. Just nothing but grief. She feels like that's all she is, grief rolled up into the shape of a person. It's pathetic, really. She's pathetic. It's a wonder that anybody can even stand her. She can barely stand herself. Maybe she should just choose to die.

But... she doesn't really want that. Living is hard, but dying is... harder. At least, for her, it was. She remembers what it was like being Charlotte, being Thursday, being alive in those bodies, those lives. It was hard. Really hard. But it was even harder being Doomsday the ghost, being dead. She couldn't feel anything. Couldn't feel anything good. Only the bad. She couldn't even sleep or dream or cry. The only thing she could feel and experience was some pressure, some sensation of wind currents, fucked up Reaper "vision", and a slight sensation of pain.

And so those are the things she chased. Especially pain. She constantly chased after the high of being in pain. Begged for it. Begged for people to hurt her, just so she could experience a taste of what it was like to be alive again. She still begs for people to hurt her, even taunts them into hurting her, because she can't let go of that feeling, even now, when she is again in a living body.

And what about the way her friends make her feel when she's around them? The warmth in her heart? Her face? All over her body? The tingling in her hands and flutters in her chest? The taste of pizza? The smell of books? The sound of laughter? The patter of rain on her skin? The way the stars look on a moonless night? Sleep with dreams? The emotional release of tears?

Why would she want to give all this up? After she spent so long in misery, wishing to have it back?

"I'm sorry," she says, pausing on the stairs. That's weird. Her voice sounds weird. And her eyes are wet. When did that happen? "I'm sorry, but- I don't- I don't want to die."

At first, there is no response from the ones whom Doom knows are there.

But then, They speak.

How... do you wish... to proceed... then... Doomsday?

It takes her a moment to respond too. How does she wish to proceed?

"Thursday... Where is she? I have to find her. I have to get her out of here," she says.

Thursday... must make... her own... choice...

"But I don't want her to die!" Doom cries, both outwardly with her voice and because she is crying.

She must... make her own... choice... Doomsday...

"Stop saying that!" she barks, gritting her teeth and kicking at the wall, although it's not hard enough to knock out any of the bricks, it's more to let The Narrative know that she's angry and not going to back down from this so easily.

We are only... repeating Ourselves... to help you... understand... that Thursday... must make... her own... choice... There is nothing... you... or anyone else... can do... to stop her... from doing... that... It is a journey... she must make... on her own... as you have made... yours... on your... own...

"But I haven't! I haven't made mine on my own! I had my friends with me! Maybe they weren't- they weren't here with me, but they're- they're-" she says, patting at her chest, although she struggles with saying it out loud because it all sounds so cheesy to her. "You get what I'm saying! Why does Thursday have to be alone? It's not fair!"

There is another break of silence before she gets a response.

Well... then... Doomsday... if you think... you know... so much... our dearest... Deus... Ex... Machina... We suggest... you take... the other... side... of the... stairs...

Doom blinks. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?! Hey! What the fuck do you mean by that! Get back here! HEY!!!! BITCHESSSSSSSSS!"

She yells into the staircase, then busts another hole in the wall, leans out, and yells into the ether, and there are no further responses from The Narrative. They seem to have gone off and left her there to her own devices.

Growling, she pulls her head back in and stomps around for a minute or two, cursing about how They're just a bunch of confusing bitches and trying to figure out what They meant.

And then it dawns on her.

Other side of the stairs.

This spiral staircase.

The spire.

Stretching off into the sky, in two directions, up and down, endlessly.

Other side of the stairs.

In a flurry of motion, Doom leans back out the hole she just broke out of the wall, looking down, then up. She climbs out, pushes herself down, feeling the resistance of non-resistance, and catches her boot on a loose stone a few feet below, pushing at it until it falls away. Using the small opening she created, she loosens more bricks until she has a widen enough opening that she feels she'll be able to fit through, takes a breath, and...

...maneuvers herself upside down, before crawling in through that hole.

It's like a whole new staircase. A new one, but the same one.

Was Thursday in here somewhere?

Doomsday took off running up them, hopefully before it was too late.

[w1ld-wr1t3r]

hmm, what about 3 and 29? im always so curious about writers reflecting on their feelings about their work!! 💘

3. What work are you most proud of (regardless of kudos/hits)?

I think it's definitely Tear The Heavens Apart, Just To Be In Your Arms. I normally don't think of myself as a sappy romance writer, I think because I don't really think about romance or being romantic in real life (I think I'm somewhere on the aro spectrum), but this fic was definitely the one I had the most fun writing this year. I really enjoyed putting as much fluffy, happy sweetness into this fic as I could. I was really glad when @f1-disaster-bi gave me their blessing to use the idea, and I think that motivated me to try really hard to make it great. I think I'll always look back on it fondly!

29. Favorite line/passage you wrote this year?

Not sure if I can pick just one! There were a lot of passages I really enjoyed writing, for different reasons.

I think probably any line in "Tear The Heavens Apart" where Lando is waxing poetic about how much he loves Martijn, and the whole build-up to Lando saying "yes" to Martijn's proposal, were some of my favorite things to write. I particularly loved this line:

"He still couldn’t believe it was real. They were engaged. They were going to get married. They were going to share their last names and grow old together."

I just feel like it encapsulates how simply beautiful it would be to fall in love, and know that the person by your side with be yours forever, and you will be theirs forever. To me, nothing is more loving and intimate than the simplest of romantic things, like sitting side by side in old age and knowing that you got to share your whole life with someone special. That's the future I envision for Norrix.

I also really enjoyed writing out the passages where they explained their ring choices to each other. I've always been fascinated by rocks (not enough to aspire to become a geologist, but enough to have a rock collection and appreciate pretty and unusual stones), and I loved looking up different gemstones and trying to pick the perfect ones for their engagement rings. Google kept giving me engagement ring ads for a while after that, LOL. But yeah, even if it was just extra random fluff to other people, I loved infodumping about the meanings of the rocks if nothing else!

Outside of this fic, I also enjoyed writing the scene in (Puppy) Love At First Sight when Lando got surprised with Peanut after the race. Nothing is cuter than baby animals, and nothing is cuter than a puppy in a fluffy Norrix fic! The sweetness that resulted from it is what encouraged me to create the whole Peanut AU, which is gonna have fluff galore. Hopefully I'll have the next installment of the series ready soon!

[cuppajj]

Updated Chiel, which is significantly better since I didn't draw her at 2 AM XD

Big thanks to @silentiaray for helping me develop her! They have pretty art and a great au comic with fun worldbuilding that you should check out if you're a fan of Slime Rancher ^^ Here's her bio under the cut

Chiel is a timid but aspiring slime. While she's never been the best at small talk, she's been making a commitment to step outside of her comfort zone and be more social with others. Being a puddle slime at heart certainly makes it a challenge, but for what it's worth, she's doing better than she used to! Her shyness can be measured by how close to the ground she is, as she tends to sink to it the stronger the emotion is. At full confidence (which is more likely during the nighttime), or whenever she needs to, she picks herself off the floor and rises to her true height. Being shy is what Chiel is known for, but she's also analytical, visionary, and above all, empathetic.

Chiel's dream is to become a botanist and geologist, studying the biochemical properties of plants and the intricacies of the moon itself. But she has a long way to go before she can make that happen, so for now, she remains an assistant in an unrelated scientific field.

[sastrugie]

ok so i dont this often but i have to pour my heart out: a year ago i reached a kind of dead end with my career and study aspirations. I had finished my bachelor of science degree in physical geography and geology and kind of wanted to change things up a bit. I was either ready to leave earth sciences completely and go into literature, but that meant starting a new bachelors which i couldnt afford so i decided to stick in the realm of earth and quarternary sciences. I choose archaeological sciences and geoarchaeology as a new field and am now doing my masters in Tübingen, Germany in said field. BUT i am unhappy. i miss pure geology and global tectonics, climatology and minerals, etc. I have a fairly good thesis topic, but i still plan on going back into earth sciences. also my polar obsession that came back recently is like .. showing me again that I am more interested in natural processes than anthropogenic ones and i feel like a 17 year old girl again, all giddy to become a polar geologist. Which i cant be anymore - because i am an archaeologist now and antarctica has little to no human impact :') ANYWAYS needed to get this off my chest, lets see what i will think about this in a year.

[collection-bundle]

Hey, love your blog. As an aspiring archeologist our hobbies/future jobs are not so different :)

Anyway here’s my question: Do you go to specific places to find these things (parks, the beach, etc.) or do you just go about your life and pay extra attention to find them?

Omg! Hello aspiring archaeologist! When I was younger I wanted to be an archaeologist or a geologist, and I couldn’t decide which so I ended up with something similar as my hobby which suits me fine 👍

To answer your question it’s a bit of both, sometimes I’ll be going about my daily routine and find amazing things (to be fair I am always on the lookout) but when I go through a dry spell or I’m just bored I’ll take time to explore places where I know trinkets are likely to be (like in the places you mentioned). Usually though it is just things found around the places I frequent

[mythgirlimagines]

ultimate geologist Leon?

o7

Leon was deeply involved in studying the makeup of Earth, especially in Japan. There were so many unique parts of Japan’s geology that he wanted to help uncover.

Writing papers about his findings, though, was the worst part. The research and all was great, especially when he could be on-location, but unfortunately the writing part had to be done, too.

He was so sick of all the rock puns the people in his life used for him. Rocks weren’t the only materials he studied, and honestly, there weren’t any fresh jokes anymore.

Being at Hope’s Peak was fine, since he had time to go on digs and everything and still be at school with people his own age. There was a definite lack of that in his field.

Even though he focused on Japan, he was looking forward to eventually expanding his sights on the geology of the world. Leon had aspirations to keep his scientific greatness, after all.

[pannyexpress]

this is a sign to gush about your ocs on main

Part of me was scared someone would actually do this and then I’d be forced to follow through lol(maybe if I actually made a habit of posting about them regularly that would motivate me to do more with them)

Let’s go with my Pokémon OCs this time!

First of which is Elysia who is actually more than a Pokémon OC, she’s my go to, my ride or die, if I play a game with a make your own character she’s the one that usually steps up to bat. She’s a sweet mother hen who has big problems telling ppl no, if she thinks she can be helpful she’ll usually lend a hand. In her pokeverse, she’s a Researcher and aspiring Pokémon professor with her specialty in Pokémon Genetics and how it influences variations, from eeveelutions to regional variants. But don’t let her brains fool you she’s got brawns to match, as a child who grew up on a ranch she’s used to hefting large Pokémon.

Then there’s my ancestor Draconid Anemone and her reincarnation Mahina from Alola. Anemone was the original Priestess of Rayquaza who sacrificed herself to quiet the raging titans in ages past(and sometimes is instead brought to the present day). Mahina her descendant no longer bears a connection to Rayquaza but instead has received Lunaalas blessing when she was born which caused her hair to turn white. Both girls have a strong sense of responsibility, though Mahinas pokemon journey showed her there’s no need to be in a rush to grow up and there’s nothing wrong with taking her time and enjoying these moments of childhood wonder and freedom.

My newest Pokémon OC is my Paldean OC Crysta. She’s an aspiring paleo/geologist. She loves rocks but unfortunately rock type Pokémon do not love her. It’s a common point of teasing from her friends. She’s sweet and easygoing but perhaps a bit too easygoing at times. Crysta can also be a bit ditzy and easily loses herself in her research. Her research typically takes her out on field studies where she can easily disappear for days at a time going no contact with anyone before suddenly popping back up excited to share what she’d learned without realizing how long she’d gone without reaching out to anyone.

I’ve had other less fleshed out Pokémon OCs like an alchemist who disguised herself as an aroma lady or an ancestor of Hilda’s named Valkyria who fought alongside the original twin heroes of reshiram and zekrom or Fairuza an ancient woman who was the chosen one of Regigigas and shared his immortality but fortunately had an immortal companion in the chosen of Zygarde

I miss tumblr rping lol I need to find some rp forums

[sleepingfancies]

show us your epic kadija characterisation ^-^

WAUGGHG HI ALINA <3333 THANK U <33333333

List of Kadija Characterization Moments book 1

Kadija gives Mortimer her personal hunting knife shortly after meeting him. Without knowing his name or who he is, she recognizes distress and wants to help.

She works on the City of Gears' namesake vast gear system for free. She has been offered a job many times, but does not want to draw the Lovely Prince's inquiries by accepting.

Kadija's first thought of Daciana is that she is the most beautiful person Kadija has ever seen.

She spends a large part of the book claiming she wants the Lovely Prince dead, when she initially only wants to prevent the other three from killing him.

Kadija sits with Mortimer for breakfast every morning, and again for tea every evening. He does not want her or anyone else to do this, and that's precisely why she does it.

Kadija stops reporting the deathbringers crew's location, movements, and plans to Inquisitor Benedek after she finds out about Mortimer's tether to the Lovely Prince.

She builds Teddy (her bear automaton) on the moving train; it is her "busywork" for when she cannot stand sitting still and waiting to arrive at their next destination.

Kadija's first technical kill happens as a split second decision, though it is one of her automatons that commits the act.

She returns to a dangerous situation to try and help Vanda Cel Tradat, who is actively trying to kill her.

It is Kadija who tricks Vidar into confessing his motives and identity. As Vidar cannot lie and Kadija can, there is a long pvp between them leading up to this.

Kadija does maintenance on her prosthetic hand as they travel, eventually perfecting the individual fingers so that each digit may move on its own.

Kadija delivers the killing blow to the Lovely Prince with the broken shaft of Mortimer's cane.

Bonus trivia!

The only things Kadija has left from her biological father are his collection of compasses and the music box he carved for her as a baby.

Kadija has nothing left of her biological mother at all, except for an enormous crack in her front door left by an axe impact.

Her friends prior to knowing the deathbringers crew are Shani Towerward (25), the university's valedictorian and a geologist; Ylva Nectaria (70), the youngest vampiric daughter of House Nectaria and aspiring globetrotter; Feivel Bainesman (42), an extremely awkward engineer for the City of Gears; and Zalika Kilomo (29), a rising star actress based in the Luminous Hall.

[bisexual-kaidan-alenko]

Yo, hellou there!!! I just saw your post and, this may be completely random (I didn't know if I should send this in an ask or by pm lol), and perhaps I'm only asking because I'm procastinating writing my fic right now but...

Is being a geologist, or aspiring geologist, as cool as I imagine it????

Idk why... but in my mind it just seems really awesome lol

That mainly it XDDD

P.S. I'm also always glad to talk about anything Mass Effect and/or Dragon Age related... But I genuinely wanted to ask about you future job too :D

Hope you have a nice day/night

~~tea

Hello and thank you for reading my post! Being an a geologist has been my dream for almost thirteen years ever since I saw the eruption in Fimmvörðuháls and seeing the eruption in Fagradalfjall made me want to be a geologist even more.

Thanks!!! I would love to talk about Dragon Age and Mass Effect with you!

Have a nice day/night!

[nicklloydnow]

“That a certain segment of the internet would be so hungry for even a fleeting glimpse of Malick is not surprising. The director is as famous for his closely guarded privacy as his output. He has not given an on-the-record interview in nearly four decades. From 1978, when Paramount released Malick’s second film, the Panhandle-set Days of Heaven, until 1998, when his World War II epic, The Thin Red Line, premiered, Malick more or less vanished. Rumors circulated around Hollywood that he was living in a garage, that he was teaching philosophy at the Sorbonne, that he was working as a hairdresser. Even as he returned to filmmaking, was nominated for Oscars, won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palm d’Or, and doubled down on his experimental style (cinephiles will never stop debating his decision to punctuate a fifties Texas family drama with CGI dinosaurs in The Tree of Life), Malick continued to maintain his silence.

(…)

Malick was born in Illinois in 1943 and spent his boyhood mostly in Waco and Bartlesville, Oklahoma, the eldest of three brothers. His mother, Irene, was a homemaker who had grown up on a farm near Chicago; his father, Emil, was the son of Assyrian Christians from Urmia, in what is now modern-day Iran, and staked out a career as an executive with the Phillips Petroleum Company. Emil was aggressively accomplished, a multi-patent-holding geologist who played professional-level church organ and served as a choir director, and he pushed the young Malick to succeed on all fronts from an early age. (A Waco Tribune-Herald news brief from 1952 noted that “eight-year-old Terry” had “surprised his classmates at Lake Waco Elementary School by presenting a 43-page paper on planets.”) But Emil could be a stern taskmaster, and he and Malick often butted heads. “They had some conflicts over the years,” Jim Lynch, a close friend of Malick’s since high school, told me. “That’s one reason Terry came to St. Stephen’s.”

St. Stephen’s is known as the Hill, both for its steep topography and its aspiration to be an enlightened beacon (as in the biblical “city on a hill”), and Malick thrived in a culture that emphasized spirituality, intellectualism, and rugged individualism. “When I first got there, it was made known that he was the local genius,” Lynch told me. Malick had the highest standing in the class his junior and senior years, served in student leadership positions like dorm council, played forward on the basketball team, and, with Romberg, co-captained the football team, playing both offensive and defensive tackle, an accomplishment of which he’s still proud. (“He says that in football he was ‘the sixty-minute man,’ ” Linklater told me. “Ecky says that the only time he boasts is when he talks about his high school athletic prowess.”)

None of Malick’s peers—or, it would seem, Malick—had any inkling that he would stake out a career as a filmmaker, but he was already exploring many of the ideas that would animate his work. Students at St. Stephen’s went to chapel twice a day, and the spiritual education there was both rigorous and open-minded, with The Catcher in the Rye taught alongside more traditional religious texts in the school’s Christian ethics class. “It was religious in a broad humanities sense,” Lynch said, a conception that Malick embraced. “Terry doesn’t like anything sectarian or dogmatic,” Lynch added. “His grounding is more in a philosophical sense of wonder.”

(…)

After Harvard and a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University, Malick began experimenting with more-white-collar careers. He worked for a short time as a globe-trotting magazine journalist, interviewing Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier and spending four months in Bolivia reporting for the New Yorker on the trial of the French philosopher Régis Debray, who had been accused of supporting Che Guevara and his Marxist revolutionary forces. (Malick never completed the piece.) Then there was a year as a philosophy lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, during which Malick concluded that he “didn’t have the sort of edge” required to be a good teacher. And finally, he moved to Hollywood, where he studied at the American Film Institute and quickly became an in-demand screenwriter, working on an early version of Dirty Harry, writing the script for the forgotten Paul Newman–Lee Marvin western Pocket Money, and making powerful friends like Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn and AFI founder George Stevens Jr.

But Malick wanted to make his own film, and he found a story he wanted to tell in the late-fifties murder spree of Charles Starkweather. Though Malick had never directed a feature, he insisted on total freedom and had few qualms about scrapping the production schedule when he became inspired to shoot a different scene or location, exasperating many in the crew. But when Badlands, starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, opened at the New York Film Festival in 1973, Malick became an instant sensation. The New York Times critic Vincent Canby called it a “cool, sometimes brilliant, always ferociously American film” and wrote that the 29-year-old Malick had “immense talent.” (The Times also reported that getting Malick to talk about Badlands was “about as easy as getting Garbo to gab.”)

Soon, Malick began production on his follow-up, Days of Heaven, a tragic love story starring Richard Gere, Sam Shepard, and Brooke Adams set in the North Texas wheat fields where Malick had worked after high school. Badlands hadn’t been an easy shoot, but on Days of Heaven, Malick’s unorthodox approach had the crew on the brink of mutiny, and when the film finally came out, in 1978, the reviews were decidedly mixed, sometimes within the same review. “It is full of elegant and striking photography; and it is an intolerably artsy, artificial film,” wrote Harold C. Schonberg in the New York Times.

Days of Heaven won an Academy Award for best cinematography, and it is now widely regarded as a masterpiece. (Roger Ebert, delighting in the stunning magic-hour photography and the poetic tone, would judge it “one of the most beautiful films ever made.”) But the experience of making the film had been so grueling for Malick that, according to Badlands producer Ed Pressman, “he just didn’t want to direct anymore.” The year after Days of Heaven premiered, Malick abandoned production on his next project, a wildly ambitious movie called Qasida that he’d hoped would tell the story of the evolution of Earth and the cosmos, and informed friends and colleagues that he was relocating full-time to Paris.

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There is only one publicly available recording of Malick’s voice. Around halfway through Badlands, he makes the single on-screen cameo of his career, engaging in a brief, tense exchange with Kit Carruthers, the Charles Starkweather–like killer played by Martin Sheen. Malick speaks in a slow, soft, higher-pitched drawl. He is unfailingly polite, a little retiring, and warm without being chummy. Malick has one of those voices that lends itself to imitation—broad and regional and distinctive—and when I spoke with his friends and colleagues, I heard several versions of it. They all sounded like the Malick we see in Badlands.

Malick’s friends describe him as a generous and humble man with a capacious intellect and a child’s insatiable curiosity. He likes going deep on birding, cosmological events, and the interconnectedness of the natural world. (“You’ll be talking to him about butterflies in the Barton Creek watershed, and then he’ll start talking about the soil and all the soil insects,” said filmmaker Laura Dunn.) He enjoys discussing the fundamental questions that drive religious and philosophical inquiry and has a deep knowledge of the Bible. (Lynch remembers that after seeing Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Malick—a fluent French speaker, with conversational German and Spanish—mentioned that he understood the film’s spoken Aramaic, because he’d grown up hearing it from his paternal grandparents.) And yet, as in high school, Malick can be just as down-to-earth as high-minded. He’ll show up for lunch at an unfussy cafe wearing a bright Hawaiian shirt and talk about football or gush about pop-culture schlock like the genetically-modified-shark movie Deep Blue Sea or drop a quote from Ben Stiller’s Zoolander. (After hearing that Malick was a fan, Stiller made an in-character happy-birthday video for the director.)

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Malick is even more buttoned-up about his work. He politely shrugs off compliments about his films—which, in the old Hollywood style, he calls “pictures”—seemingly agonizing over flaws, missed opportunities, and bad memories of the production. “I’ll mention something like, ‘Hey, I heard there were some seventy-millimeter prints of Days of Heaven. And he’ll say, ‘Oh, gosh, when that opened, I was out of the country,’ ” Linklater said. “I think talking about his work takes him back emotionally.”

Laura Dunn, whom Malick recruited to direct The Unforeseen, a documentary about Austin’s development boom and the pollution of Barton Springs, told me that Malick finds it difficult to watch movies from start to finish. “He’s the kind of artist who seems almost tormented by his need to keep working on something,” she said. “If he’s sitting in a dark room, watching a movie all the way through, he’s restless because he’ll still be editing one of his own movies, or he’ll think about all the things he did that he regrets and wants to go back and change.”

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Malick takes years to finish his films, hiring teams of editors to put together different cuts, and finding and discarding entire story lines during the post-production process. In the final cut of The Tree of Life, Malick resolves the drama at the center of the film by having his young protagonist’s family move away from his boyhood home. There’s a bittersweet sense of a chapter closing and an uncertain future lying ahead. But in an earlier, unreleased version of the film, the story of the protagonist, Jack, ends not with his family’s departure from Waco but on a more triumphant note: he arrives as a boarding student at St. Stephen’s. It doesn’t take a deep familiarity with Malick’s life story to see the parallels between the family in the film and Malick’s own. Jack bridles under the discipline of his stern, accomplished, and ultimately loving father. He worships his angelic mother. He and his two younger brothers turn to each other for support. The film is framed around the premature death of the middle brother. (Malick’s brother Larry took his own life as a young man.)

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Malick’s silence has always seemed, in part, a way to resist such a reading. When Lynch mentioned to Malick that he saw the director’s last three features—The Tree of Life, To the Wonder, and Knight of Cups—as an “autobiographical trilogy,” Malick took umbrage. “He didn’t like me labeling them that way,” Lynch said. “He didn’t want people thinking that he was just making movies about himself. He was making movies about broader issues.” Malick might very well say the same of Song to Song, but nevertheless, it’s tempting to see his latest work as an extension of that discarded Tree of Life ending—the aging director offering a raucous love letter to the city that offered him inspiration as a boy and has sustained him ever since.”