"For beauty, my Plædrus, beauty alone, is lovely and visible at once. For, mark you, it is the sole aspect of the spiritual which we can perceive through our senses, or bear so to perceive. Else what should become of us, if the divine, if reason and virtue and truth, were to speak to us through the senses? Should we not perish and be consumed by love, as Semele aforetime was by Zeus? So beauty, then, is the beauty-lover's way to the spirit--but only the way, only the means, my little Phædrus." . . . And then, sly arch-lover that he was, he said the subtlest thing of all: that the lover was nearer the divine than the beloved; for the god was in the one but not in the other--perhaps the tenderest, most mocking thought that ever was thought, and source of all the guile and secret bliss the lover knows. Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought--these are the artist's highest joy. And our solitary felt in himself at this moment power to command and wield a thought that thrilled with emotion, an emotion as precise and concentrated as thought: namely, that nature herself shivers with ecstasy when the mind bows down in homage before beauty."

I <3 Death in Venice! It's so beautifully written. A very dramatic change from Kafka. Hmm...
(Watch it here, or settle with the trailer)

My Winter courses for present:
(subjectable to change. I'm hoping to take Greek next Fall, and some kind of Classics course this Winter)

Anthropology of Meaning
Through the analysis of language, symbols and cultural constructions of meaning, this course explores how people in different societies make sense of their world, and the ways in which they organise that knowledge, and how ideologies represent the different interests present in a society.

Studies in Japanese cinema: 1960s avant-garde cinema
(We'll be doing a bit of Godard, too. So French + Japanese New Wave)

The Making of Modern Poetry (1900-1950)

Studies in 19th century Lit:
Victorian era: Medicine and mystery
(Apparently the professor is very good. hmm)

German Lit 19th century
(Another instance of good professor-ness. I'm taking either this, or a 1) a culture course 2) another other-country lit course 3) a classics Greek lit course, because the Classics are so pure!)

Tentative :3

<3

So conveniently fell off a bicycle while (ironically) getting some medicine and smashed the inside of my lip. Blood, all over jacket, shirt, (white) headphones. Got picked up by Kind Stranger while walking streets bloodied and dizzy-eyed, and brought to clinic, where a Kind doctor told me how lucky I am to have hurt (very majorly) the part of my body that heals the fastest.
Strangely, my face is very much in tact. No fashionable scars, apart from minor redness that I am sure will disappear in a few days.

Means I may not have to do my german presentation, due to inability to speak. How convenient.
(Funny how mysterious cold has dissipated momentarily in lieu of new illness. How the universe works in my favour)

It's rather melodramatic, in retrospect. People sweep me glances on the street, because I am pitiable.
Hee.

Proper update later.

Update: It's funny how people here understand bike accidents. It's nice not to be the first to have gotten hurt in one. Hee. Hmm. Still dizzy spells present. I feel so valiant in my efforts to combat them and get work done.
Professor, because he doesn't want me to die writing the essay, has given me an extension. Still. Perhaps should settle in bed and read Metamorphosis, which I'm supposed to have finished. Mrr.

I can now record lectures! oh, how practical. Thank you, dear father <3

Should I get the red and inscribe "mon opium" or...
the blue and inscribe "atlantis, dreaming"?

Imperative! tell me what you think!

I am in love with the Mcgill library.

My goodness.
old, musty bookshelves full of old, withering books here I come. I will pitch a tent and spend morning and night devouring these books.
So much!

Pictures, later.

Update: for now I've borrowed Beauty by Kirwan and "Dreams and Primitive Culture", a withering lecture from 1918. the lecturer refers to primitive culture as the "savage and barbarous peoples'. It's fascinating.

An excerpt: "the passion of the lover, writes Ficino, is not extinguished by the sight or touch of any body, for what he truly desires and unknowingly suffers is the splendour of God shining through the body. it is a desire like that of Narcissus, that can never be satisfied. In the act of beauty I both possess and do not possess; beauty is before me but before its presence is the knowledge of deprivation, the absence of that thing which has brought it into being for me. here the ecstasy and abandonment of the grand passion, and why people in love consider themselves both moer fortunate and more unfortunate than anyone else"

Strangely, it was the least overwhelming among books on the shelf I found... (aesthetics, psychology, spiritualism, demonology, dreams- what order do these books flow from? and I'm talking old, musty books from centuries-ago, here)

of you, the sky that upturns upon its shoulders
my head swims in a sea of madness, a soul stretches
like a rubber band across fields unbidden
on the wind, I remember my name again.

~
Caressing the marble and stone,
Love that was special for one,
The waste in the fever I heat,
How I wish you were here with me now.

Body that curls in and dies,
And shares that awful daylight,
Warm like a dog round your feet,
How I wish you were here with me now.

Hangman looks round as he waits,
Cord stretches tight then it breaks,
Someday we will die in your dreams,
How I wish we were here with you now. 

Joy Division- In A Lonely Place

{link}

~
Yay :3