"...feels like a LinkedIn post mercilessly stretched to nearly three hundred pages."

“On the other side of the barrier of language, behind its curtain, stripped of its husk of speech, the spirit of man wanders ceaselessly.”

I also enjoyed John Robert Cozens and his 'Mount Etna from the Grotta del Capro', probably because it reminded me of Rembrandt's 'Rest on the Flight Into Egypt', which I'm a bit obsessed by.

if you’re an isolated, angsty, strange young man, please know that you can become a Kierkegaard scholar instead of joining fringe online communities

"London has always been a vast ocean in which survival is not certain." the superb opening of Ackroyd's "biography of London"

Daedalus adding hot sun skeptics to his prototyping team for viewpoint diversity

Yes! This (Titian's The Young Englishman, 1540-45) is the portrait that stopped me in my tracks in the Pitti Palace: a completely real person - although identity unknown in this case, I think - calmly looking back at the viewer. 🎨 #Titian #PalazzoPitti

They are set free, they have overcome death, and they return to share our lives. Marcel Proust, The Swann Way (transl. Brian Nelson) #AContinuation25

Early Warming Over the Southern Ocean During the Last Deglaciation - Zheng, Bauska and Osman - 2025 - GRL agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/... I promise to write a serious thread of what (IMHO as Peisong's advisor) is an innovative analysis. This will have to suffice for now.

Happy birthday to Elizabeth von Arnim, author of one of my favorite books, The Enchanted April. She was also a very mischievous person, scolded often throughout her lifetime, and was once called an “outrageous baked fish” (but in German). From The Solitary Summer:

A daguerreotype by Hermann Biow (1804-1850) of the destruction of the great Hamburg fire of 1842, a view from the roof of the stock exchange in the direction of Lombardsbrücke. One of the first photos of the city of Hamburg, and one of the first news photos in the world.

“Vates was the Greek word for the inspired bard, speaking the words of a god. To most people, this voice speaks only in a dream, and only in unremembered dream.”

“in the wide swathes of time, everything will wash over us” Afterbody, Medha Singh @medhawrites.bsky.social Blue Diode Press

Last glow of the evening sun.

“The soul is not to pile up defences round herself. She is not to withdraw and seek her heavens inwardly, in mystical ecstasies. She is not to cry to some God beyond, for salvation. She is to go down the open road, as the road opens, into the unknown…”

"Description gets badmouthed these days, by impatient readers wanting to get on with the story and stylists who privilege voice, but description was how I got serious about this business." Enjoyed this interview with Alvin Lu, and am really enjoying his DAYDREAMERS.

“Each year should be one day longer than the previous one,” writes Canetti. “A new day when nothing ever happens, a day when no one dies.”

"...Kafka deletes with remarkable consistency passages that are too psychologically revealing, too readily interpretable, and too intimately personal". Mark Harman on translating Kafka over @literaryhub.bsky.social lithub.com/the-case-for...

Humbled and beyond pleased to be working with Belt on this project! Stay tuned...

This is me: happy with this platform but social media skeptical, an overthinker with real life distractions that nudge me from posting. But I like the people I find here.

“We pursue them until, from the imperfection of our faculties, we are lost in impenetrable night."

Literary solutions to male loneliness:

last night's discussion on LITERARY PLEASURE is now up on YouTube ... you can watch/listen here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=B89u...

Love has its triumph and death has one, in time and the time beyond us. We have none. Only the sinking of stars. Silence and reflection. Yet the song beyond the dust will overcome our own. - Ingeborg Bachmann, "Songs in Flight"

It's Kate Bush's birthday. It's Emily Brontë's birthday. It is Kate Bush's and Emily Brontë's birthday.

Reassuring that even Keats's descriptive powers deserted him from time to time: 'it is composed of rocks, Mountains, mountainous and rocky Islands, more rocks, those pointy hilly things, large stones aka rocks, those things that are the opposite of valleys, small boulders or, you know, rocks'

25 July 1829: Bristol artist & fossil collector George Cumberland publishes an article about fossil marine reptiles, highlighting the important contributions of 'three female pioneers' at Lyme Regis: #MaryAnning, Anne Congreve and Elizabeth Philpot, and of Etheldred Benett in Wiltshire.

“These moments of time will disappear. You yourself will forget my voice, the body you desired, your tremblings, your hesitations. I would so like for you... to carry away a part of me... Not a vague memory... but the energy of a star, its vibration in the dark. A truth.”

“It seems certain to me that, on the same walk, two beings, unless they resemble each other in some strange sense, could not possibly pick up the same stones, so true is it that we find only what meets a deep need...” www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/07...

This is fascinating - from Michael Symmons Roberts’ book on Messiaen - and the division of people into Diachronics & Episodics. Like Isaiah Berlin’s fox & hedgehog, I think it’s a continuum … and despite seeing myself mostly as a Diachronic, I do think there are traits in my being that are Episodic.

“Time corrodes not only everything that lives, but even itself, as if, weary of continuing and exasperated by the Possible, its best part, it aspired to extirpate that as well.” —Drawn and Quartered, E.M. Cioran; tr. Richard Howard

'You have not seen our weedy river, you do not know the significance of its weedy bars, until you have seen the blue heron wading and pluming itself on it. I see that it was made for these shallows, and they for it.'

“In this book, those who are wealthy and adult and male run roughshod over the weak, the poor, the women and the children among them. Women who dare to step outside the boundaries of what is expected of them are entirely crushed.” Love this take on Mansfield Park (gift link).

Descartes gave us all the tools we need to survive in an era of misinformation. Simply begin with the understanding that you are real but everything else is fairly likely to be the cruel games of a demon sent to torment you specifically.

A fascinating, nourishing conversation—more of this please.

It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. T. S. Eliot, “Dante” in Selected Essays (1932)

“Laruelle's non-photography suggests that this misalignment [of text and image] hints at the presence of an "independent consciousness," and here Warr refers to something Sebald wrote about an observer who sees not only the characters and the narrator, but also the author himself.”

@vertigoterry.bsky.social on the incredible Shadows of Reality project. sebald.wordpress.com/2025/06/25/s...

In vain we hope to be known by open and visible conservatories, when to be unknown was the means of their continuation and obscurity their protection. Sir Thomas Browne

Walter Benjamin literally lived with Klee’s Angel of History, which, miraculously, survived its owner. Excellent long read here

“While living in Paris and trying to write what would become The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggs, Rilke sat in on courses by sociologist Georges Simmel (as did Robert Musil and Walter Benjamin). Simmel’s influence on Rilke was tremendous…”

“Thank you…enjoy the catering!”

“…we are fighting for the very soul of the world.”

when I seek deep within me for knowledge of myself what I find is obscure, internal, unformulated and as secret as any complicity

Happy 256th birthday to Anne Royall, who had a satirical muck-raking paper in Washington DC called The Huntress. She started it after she turned 60, and ran it until her death at 85. That was after she had been a self-supporting writer for years, surviving widowhood, poverty, violence, and lawsuits.

“The logical conclusion of a technofeudal oligarchy combining forces with an authoritarian political movement is compulsory enrollment in the security state’s platform architecture of surveillance, indoctrination, and behavioral modification.” Essential read for educators, students, and parents.

Gas Station Kern County California, 1938 Dorothea Lange