tomrum
2.63K subscribers
3.75K photos
2 videos
24 files
85 links
The trouble with being born

Admin: @TwoMonthsOff
Download Telegram
"He seemed to get smaller and smaller as the train steadily accelerated. A whistle tore the air again, and a bird flapped its wings and took off from some branch. In no time at all, the train gained speed and vanished. I felt a sudden pang of loss. Motionless, I started into the direction that the train had gone. I railway signal flashed red. I looked up to find wisps of low clouds floating in the blue morning sky. Fresh now unspoiled by footprints coated the front end of the platform. All of it seemed like a scenic description meant to indicate that Takaki was gone. However. I stood there confident that I could take on life. No matter how far he went, he was with me. While I felt a deep sense of loss, I was strangely fullfilled. So I told myself : We will meet again someday, though it won't be soon, and I will try to be a stronger person by then.

But we would never meet again."
Ray K. Metzker, Leapin’ zzz, 1982
I've known supreme happiness, and I'm not greedy enough to want what I have to go on forever. Every dream ends. Wouldn't it be foolish, knowing that nothing lasts forever, to insist that one has a right to do something that does?
[...]but, if eternity existed, it would be this moment.

- Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow
Metro station in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (1978)
Forwarded from alcoholic.exe
Then I started coming home unhappy.
“What’s the matter, Hank?”
I had to get drunk every night
A Clockwork Orange, French lobby card for the theatrical release, 1972
“You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretences of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.”

- Octave Mirbeau, The Torture Garden (1899)
Der Einsame im Herbst (The lonely one in autumn), from Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde
Ryszard Winiarski, Game for One, 1988
Shashlychnaya grill house, Moscow, USSR, 1970
Tiger and Dragon cats! (Original cat-tattoo art prints by Kazuaki Horitomo)
Victor Westerholm (Finnish, 1860 - 1919) – Maisemaharjoitelma, 1885
It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.

- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Hygeia, Goddess of Health (Detail, 1615), Peter Paul Rubens