Softlylovingsstuff - Tumblr Blog

Children, like adults, were caught up in war fever after hostilities broke out in August 1914. Many wanted to join the Army, including nine-year-old Alfie Knight from Dublin. Alfie wrote this letter to Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener, volunteering as a front-line despatch rider. In a reply sent by his private secretary, Lord Kitchener thanked Alfie for his offer, but explained that he was 'not yet quite old enough to go to the front'. 

“We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.”

- Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front.

Like the stars shining in the evening sky, my eyes can sense all these beautiful mysteries // part 1.

Era Leisner (born in 1988). Norway

Silver Hounds (2024) L

Acrylics and silver leaf on canvas

100 × 100 cm, 39 × 39 in approx

"May thy riot gear chip and shatter"

Seen inside the occupied Portland State University library, where student protesters are preparing for a police raid

It seemed to me that I had dreamt about her once, when I was a boy or a teenager: a dream with the scent of orange trees in blossom.

– Agustín Cadena, from “Murillo Park,” Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic (Small Beer Press, 2011)

Every time I do something dramatic or extravagant I think to myself “this is for Lord Byron” or “Oscar Wilde would’ve loved this”. And I think it’s incredible sexy of me to do so. Conversely every time I get tipsy I think “it’s what Dorian Gray would’ve wanted”. Which is less sexy and more a moralistic problem but it’s whatever.

saw u in a dream and wanted to stay with u forever and ever so i didn’t wake up until noon the next day

“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. […] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”

—

Johann Hari,

Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?

(via bigfatsun)

you can be a dickhead to me but my whimsy will always haunt your narrative

I feel like this at all times

currently suffocating under the immense weight of knowing that i will never write something as good as dune 😁😁

Dune: Part Two, dir. by Denis Villeneuve // A Panathenaic amphora (Greece (Attica), ca. 365BC - 360BC) (x)

Carl Bretzke, Highway 1, Oil on aluminum

you kept making yourself the victim

Carol Ann Duffy, from "December"; Rapture

Soul Mates

I don’t know how you are so familiar to me—or why it feels less like I am getting to know you and more as though I am remembering who you are. How every smile, every whisper brings me closer to the impossible conclusion that I have known you before, I have loved you before—in another time, a different place, some other existence.

— Lang Leav

― Albert Camus, Notebooks: 1935-1951

stop asking me wyd i’m literally always thinking about love and how it touches every aspect of the human experience

"Cliffhanger"

Abandoned villa, Chemin du Raidillon, Saint-Pierre-en-Port, France

John Sloan - Turning out the Light (1905)

- Evelyn Waugh, from Brideshead Revisited (1945)