the picture of dorian gray // oscar wilde
“I’m 24 years old and play this game with myself: buy myself something delicious for the weekend, blueberry muffins or flaky croissants, and forget it by Friday. Saturday morning comes and I am lucky to know me. I wasn’t born knowing how to love me, but I’m learning now; catching up for lost time between us. I keep the windows open. I play oldies throughout every corner of my apartment. I tell the dog how good it feels, at least for today, at least for right now, to be alive.”
— Schuyler Peck, Can’t Get Enough Of My Love (via schuylerpeck)
every so often the spirit of a sapphic classics professor at oxford consumes me… and today is that day: no bra, a half-buttoned, loose shirt tucked into a pair of tweed trousers, spectacles and dark maenad curls… sprawled on the lawn with the iliad, writing fragmented poetry, dreaming of sapphic love and murder mysteries …
I’m going to save up for a new motorcycle by running a scam where I bet straight dudes at bars twenty bucks that I can get a girl’s number in under five minutes and then politely walk up her and say, “I just bet that asshole twenty bucks that I could get your number. I’ll split it with you if you pretend to laugh like I just said a good pick up line and then write a fake number on my hand.”
Like, I never understood those kind of bets in those shitty teen movies. Everybody loves being part of a scheme, man. Use your head.
It breaks my heart how well the misunderstood understands others
Idealist
“You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”
— Buddha
i want to see an adaptation of the iliad that accurately portrays achilles’ grief over the death of patroclus.
i don’t want to see achilles act out in anger and violence as he realizes that patroclus died in his armor.
i don’t want to see achilles remain stoic and emotionless as he carries patroclus’ body back to camp.
show me achilles collapse to the ground when he hears the news. show me achilles sob so loudly that his mother on the bottom of the sea hears him and thinks him dead. show me how another warrior must hold down achilles’ hands so that he does not cut open his own throat to join patroclus in death.
show me achilles carrying back patroclus’ body and sobbing into his chest. show me achilles refusing to leave patroclus’ side to eat or sleep because he can do nothing but cry. show me how achilles looks his mother in the eye and say how he no longer cares if he dies when only a few days prior he said that nothing is worth his life.
i want to see achilles, the most powerful warrior of the greeks, to be completely undone by grief.
getting overly defensive of your favourite historical / literary / classical figure
suddenly remembering how much knowledge there is to acquire and getting stressed about the overwhelming amount of stuff you don’t know
roman numerals: you either love them or you hate them
when your teacher is obsessed with one bit of the course and teaches you that for weeks then breezes over the rest
anachronisms
you’ve listened to so many in our times that melvyn bragg is basically your internal monologue
waking up in the morning with a desire to know everything about one specific thing that’s totally unrelated to everything you’re studying
‘ooo i know this word!’ she did not know that word
muddling up the actual history, the fictionalised versions of the actual history, and the fanfictionalised versions of the fictionalised versions of the actual history
‘what can this cartoon / movie / song / art tell us about x’
history students are over prepared for politics and classics students are over prepared for english lit
reading aloud in terrible accents in english lit
j s t o r