bella was lucky she didn’t have a cell phone of any kind because you know ya boi edward would be blowing up that phone 24-7 going “saw a snail today…. effervescent” or some shit equivalent
happy 3 yr anniversary to the post that singlehandedly launched the twilight renaissance
In his chamber, the air is sharply scented: juniper, cinnamon. He takes off his orange coat. In the dimness of the room, shuttered against the afternoon, it blazes as if he handled fire. There were certain miserable divines, in darker days than these, who said that if God had meant us to wear coloured clothes He would have made coloured sheep. Instead, His providence has given us dyers, and the materials for their craft. Here in the city, amid dun and slate, donkey's back and mouse, gold quickens the heart; on these days of grey swilling rain that afflict London in every season, we are reminded of heaven by a flash of celestial blue. Just as the soldier looks up to the flutter of bright banners, so the workman on his daily trudge rejoices to see his betters shimmer above him in imperial purple, in silver and flame and halcyon against the wash of the English sky.
Hilary Mantel: The Mirror and the Light
“Enfleurage is a method of extracting essences from flowers that is more than a century old. It makes use of the fact that the volatile perfume material of flowers is soluble in fat. Glass plates, each supported in a wooden frame, are coated on both sides with layers of fat. Flower petals are laid on the plates, and the plates are piled on top of one another, so that the volatile products given off are caught by the layers of fat above and below. When all the perfume of the petals has been absorbed by the fat, they are replaced with a fresh supply, and the process is repeated until the fat is saturated with the perfume. This saturated fat is known as a pomade , and it is then dissolved in an alcohol-based solvent in order to obtain the essential oil. Enfleurage is an intensely sensual process, whose voluptuousness is well captured by Patrick Süskind in the novel Perfume : The souls of these noblest of blossoms [jasmine and tuberose] could not be simply ripped from them, they had to be methodically coaxed away. In a special impregnating room, the flowers were strewn on glass plates smeared with cool oil or wrapped in oil-soaked cloths; there they would die in their sleep. It took three or four days for them to wither and exhale their scent into the adhering oil. Then they were carefully plucked off and new blossoms spread out. This procedure was repeated a good ten, twenty times and it was September before the pomade had drunk its fill and the fragrant oil could be pressed from the cloths … In purity and verisimilitude, the quality of the jasmine paste or the huile antique de tubéreuse won by such a cold enfleurage exceeded that of any other product of the perfumer’s art. Particularly with jasmine, it seemed as if the oiled surface were a mirror-image that radiated the sticky-sweet, erotic scent of the blossom with life-like fidelity.”
— Essence and Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume, Mandy Aftel
i really love that line οὐ μὲν γάρ τοι ἔτ᾽ ἄλλος ἐλεύσεται ἐνθάδ᾽ Ὀδυσσεύς, "no other odysseus will ever come to you," because he's saying not that he is the true odysseus but that there is no truer odysseus alive on the earth. he doesn't say, 'i am the real odysseus.' he says, 'i'm the realest odysseus you're going to get.'
there was an odysseus before there was a war
but who remembers him?
« For centuries there’s been one path through fiction we’re most likely to
travel—one we’re actually told to follow—and that’s the dramatic arc: a
situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides. Teachers bid young
writers to follow the arc. If you ask Google how to
structure a story, your face will be hammered with pictures of arcs.
And it is
an elegant shape, especially when I translate arc to its natural form, a wave.Its rise and fall traces a motion we know in heartbeats, breaking surf, the
sun passing overhead. There’s power in a wave, its sense of beginning,
midpoint, and end; no wonder we fall into it in stories. But something that
swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no? So
many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. […]
Here are the ones
Stevens calls “nature’s darlings.”
These patterns aren’t just around us; they inform our bodies, too. We
have wiggling meanders in our hair, brains, and intestines; branching
patterns in capillaries, neurons, and lungs; explosive patterns in areolas,
irises, and sneezes; spirals in ears, fingertips, DNA, and fists. We invoke these patterns to describe motions in
our minds, too: someone spirals into despair or compartmentalizes
emotions, thoughts meander [..]. There are, in other words, recurring ways that we order and make
things. Why wouldn’t they form our [literary] narratives, too?
A digressive narrative meanders; at times it flows quickly and at
times barely at all, often loops back on itself, yet ultimately it moves
onward. A spiraling narrative might move around and around with a system
of rhythmic repetitions, yet it advances, deepening into the past, perhaps, or
rising into the future. A radial
narrative could spring from a central hole—an incident, pain, absence,
horror—around which it keeps circling or from which it keeps veering, but
it scarcely moves forward in time. A fractal narrative could branch from a
core or seed, repeating at different scales the shape or dynamic of that core […]. And cellular narratives come in like
parts, not moving forward in time from one to another but creating a
network of meaning. […]
In this book I’ll look at ways that writers have done all of this, finding patterns other than the arc inside their stories. This will be a museum of specimens. »
—
Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative
cannot stop thinking abt the paris review’s essay series on the history of significance of certain colours, hue’s hue:
the sole surviving painting by the Dutch golden age painter Torrentius, ‘Still Life with a Bridle’, and Zbigniew Herbert on the mysteries of his works, in an essay of the same name.
