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“Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.”

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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studying at Oxford

#*mine #photography #Oxford #university of oxford #why i study #study aesthetic #studyblr #studyspo #study blog #study motivation #phd journey #phdblr #phd life #dark academia #dark academia layouts #dark academia moodbord #dark academia aesthetics

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spent a lovely day at Merton college, Oxford

#studyblr #study aesthetic #studentblr #studyspo #*mine #why i study #Oxford #university of oxford #photography #dark academia #dark academia moodbord #dark academia layouts #dark academia aesthetics #dark academism #phd journey #phdblr #cottagecore

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maybe memory, the present, our imagination, both novelty and familiarity is enough. It is through the genuine conditions of our lives we can discover the sources to love. Love already is a possible option at every corner I turn. But I choose to focus on the gaps since it is difficult to believe that there still are sources of love when what I witness are all the ways things (and myself) fall short of the good. So what do we do when things are no longer good? Our relationships, our work, and our self-conception about them in relation to these matters? I think it is as Simone de beauvoir tell us, to take seriously the conditions of existence as sources of love. To find love in our midst, even in the ruins, to will another’s freedom and my own, and to love is to recognize this freedom given to us.

“As Freud reminds us, there’s something primal about the desire to repeat - as if we couldn’t believe ourselves fully to be existing in the present if we weren’t able to reenact the past, altering ourselves in the process. Memory is not enough.”

— James Longenbach, in the chapter on “Repetition” from “How Poems Get Made” (W.W. Norton, 2018)

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the gap also between people’s change in behavior — I try to close this gap by wondering if I have done something wrong, throwing myself into the abyss as a penance for my wrongdoings. self-interpretation of this sort hasn’t been so helpful but it has been my default position given the limited view we have of other’s minds, especially when they refuse to give an account for the distancing in the first place. How can I let go of any discomfort about the distance, the rupture, without trying to fill in the gaps? To accept the void as it is, without tossing myself there to create meaning out of it based on attributing faults within myself? To let go of interpretation of another mind when no intelligibility is accounted for—this too is courage and this too is love (of self and love of the world as it is). amor fati, amor mundi.

All my life has been an attempt to close gaps

Between what I see and what I believe

What I believe and what I feel

What I feel and who I am

Where I’m at and what I could be.

Trying to close these gaps, I’m either stretched across the horizon or falling into abyss.

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Sundays at Magdalen College, Oxford

#studyblr #phd journey #dark academia layouts #dark academia #dark academia aesthetics #*mine #light academia #Oxford #university of oxford #photography #study aesthetic #studyspo #study blog #phdblr #england #phd life

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Hey there!— I'm really sorry to intrude, but ever since I stumbled on your blog I have been dreaming with a fiery mind, because your ambition is so like to mine— I have longed to go to Oxford since I was a child, to study art history, and seeing your photographs of the dreaming spires has inspired me so <33 I want it with such a swirl of wanting, & your blog makes me feel seen, since I don't know anybody else with quite the passion for Oxford that I have and that we seem to share. —I thank you for your two beautiful blogs and all your photos, and I wish you well, for your DPhil and other ventures too!!

Oh hi! Please never apologize for writing to me, as I never see it as an intrusion of any sort ! Thanks for sharing with me your dreams and for wishing me well with my dphil <3 I love your enthusiasm and passion for oxford. I truly hope I can rekindle that within me as well. I definitely had that sense of passion before I came here. My first year did feel like a dream and I was full of awe and wonder for the place. Just like so many other things in life, that initial feeling gradually dies out by encountering many disappointments and the nitty gritty details of reality and the daily grind. But I’ve made an intentional effort to have appreciation for Oxford and this one-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It truly helps to hear from people like you who help me see this place with fresh eyes. I wish you the best with your endeavors and that you continue to cultivate your loves and that zeal <3

#academia #phd journey #phd struggles #Oxford #thanks anon!

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spring is finally here at Oxford

#*mine #studyblr #study aesthetic #study blog #phdblr #phd journey #phd life #university of oxford #oxford #photography #studyspo #dark academia moodbord #dark academia #dark academia layouts #dark academia aesthetic #dark academism #England

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first week of May: study spaces

#*mine #studyblr #study blog #study aesthetic #studyspo #dark academia #dark academia layouts #dark academia aesthetic #light academia #Oxford #university of oxford #my school #photography #England

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Carl Phillips, from “Star Map with Action Figures”, Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020

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“I feel myself to be an alien in the world. If you have no ties to either mankind or to God, then you are an alien.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Nachlass, MS 135 (28 July 1947)

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“My thoughts are tired. I am not seeing things freshly, but rather in a pedestrian, lifeless way. It is as if a flame had gone out and I must wait until it starts to burn again by itself.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Nachlass, MS 102 (13 January 1915)

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“It is only as something strange, forbidden, as something free, that the other is revealed as an other. And to love him genuinely is to love him in his otherness and in that freedom by which he escapes. Love is then renunciation of all possession, of all confusion. One renounces being in order that there may be that being which one is not.”

— Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

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He’s literally me

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Opera Garnier, 2024

#paris #paris france #opera #*me #*mine #photooftheday #photography #dark academia #dark academia aesthetic

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“a star a tree and the longing in between”

— Gabriel Rosenstock, from The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World, ed. Ivan M. Granger (Poetry Chaikhana, 2014)

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May Sarton, from Journal of a Solitude [ID in alt text]