Alyonalovesaardvarks

December 22

“Life could be just sitting on the grass, holding a daisy and not plucking the petals, because the answers are already known, or because they are of so little importance that discovering them would not be worth the life of a flower.”

— Jose Saramago

okay you know that scan/photo of a teen girl’s diary entry that goes like “wore yellow dress today. chris keeps trying to talk to me even though he KNOWS i’m not interested! ugh! man landed on moon.” anyway that’s the mood

Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

David Foster Wallace, This is Water

Laura Venditti

due to personal reasons i’ll be

Instagram credit: not.so.well.read

Gwen John - Self Portrait (1902)

Gwen John was a Welsh artists whose legacy mostly consists of portraits of anonymous female sitters. During her lifetime she was overshadowed by her bother Augustus, however, today it seems that his prophecy that “in 50 years I will be known as Gwen John’s brother” has come true since most contemporary art critics see her as the more talented of the two.

At 27 she permanently moved Paris since it was easier there for young women to make a living. She lived a fairly solitary life with her cats, devoted most of her time to painting and had several passionate love affairs with men and women. She created several thousand art works that have been praised for their atmosphere of serenity and a reduced colour palette, and are presented in major contemporary collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Tate Gallery.