Charles Bukowski, Pulp

— Vincent van Gogh, from a letter to Theo

[text ID: but the sunflower is mine in a way.]

"Christmas is a magical moment of glory; the birth of humanity."

Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann

what r ur top books of all time

The Metamorphosis, The Castle, Letters to Milena by Franz Kafka

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (no, it's not too long - if anything, it should've been longer)

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Samvel by Raffi

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Fish in Exile by Vi Khi Nao

Demian. Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend by Hermann Hesse

South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky

The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante

All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Every time I read or watch Lord of the Rings I can’t help but think about how Tolkien had survived one of the bloodiest, most cruel, most dirtiest and darkest wars in human history, came back and wrote this:

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”

And this:

"'I wish it need not have happened in my time,' said Frodo.

'So do I,' said Gandalf, 'and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.'"

And this:

"I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend."

And this:

“Many that live deserve death and some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be so eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the wise cannot see all ends."

And this:

“True courage is about knowing not when to take a life, but when to spare one.”

And clearly they were all written partly because he survived the war, because of what he’d seen and done and learned. But at the same time the unwillingness to lose faith, the courage and strength that this man had to believe in these things after going through hell! It makes the nihilists look so cheap, so uninteresting! People who’ve went through concentration camps and wars believe in humanity anyway, isn’t that proof that hope and love exist? And many, many, many of them did not return or returned broken and cruel and traumatised to the point when no faith in others was possible for them, and nobody can blame them. But there were many who refused to lose faith and hope. They have seen some the worst that life has to offer and came back believing that we shouldn’t be eager to deal out death and judgement and should love only that which the sword defends.

No matter how many people say that humanity is horrible and undeserving of love, and life is dark and worthless, and love doesn’t exist I remember this and have hope anyway. Because there were people who have actually had all reason to believe in the worst and still believed in the good, so the good must be real. The good is real, even despite the evil, and we must trust in it.

“You’re not a monster,” I said. But I lied. What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

What is dark academia, if not studying late into the night on dangerous amounts of caffeine

“My ingenious fingers wait when they have found

The petal flesh beneath the robe they part.

How curious, complex, the touch, this subtle art–

As the dream of fragrance, the miracle of sound.”

— ‘The Touch’ by Renée Vivien

[Natalie Clifford Barney published ‘Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes’, a book of lesbian poetry about love. Her father found out about this and bought the ones that were left to have them burnt.

A few years later, Renée Vivien (a lover of Barney’s) wrote her own lesbian poetry and had it published— ‘The Muse of the Violets: Poems’]

dark academia in computer related courses:

spilt coffee on messy arithmetic and algorithm notes.

continuously pressing alt + tab to read classics on your computer during class.

code blocks reflected on your anti-radiation glasses.

black sweaters because it's cold in the computer laboratory.

coding websites with dark academia color palettes.

encrypting and decrypting secret letters written in codes/ciphers.

lowkey creating a game which is actually a murder plan (and which is actually inspired from fyodor dostoevsky's crime and punishment too).

sketching and editing your secret society's logo on photoshop.

messy scribbles of java codes on paper.

listening to classical music on spotify.

hacking your principal's computer to retrieve documents that you can later on use against the school system (especially because you're hoping for a change in cafeteria food).

downloading free pdf or epubs of your favorite classic books because you are on a budget.

creating groupchats where you all discuss the possibilities of a bacchanalia.

lowkey sending trojans to classmates you don't like and think of it as a modern trojan war in and of itself.

achilles as your wallpaper.

eyebags from sleepless nights trying to find the error in the code.

joining forums where people are pretentious and anonymous (oooh, you mean reddit?)

purchasing oxford shoes online.

creating collages of your favorite greek gods, mythical creatures and heroes.

editing aesthetic academia look books on your editing application of choice.

suggesting revolution through digital arts.

animating little-known histories from around the world.

learning a language on duo lingo.

binge watching documentaries on youtube because learning is a principle.

borrowing chemicals from the stem laboratory to stage a suicide of your classmate's murder inside the computer lab.

staying up all night in the library reading shakespeare's hamlet or plato's the republic instead of making your capstone project.

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”

― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

meet me at our spot.