eyeballworld

[eyeballworld]

“I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric.”

― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

#osamu dazai #dazai osamu #no longer human #japanese author #quote #my post

[eyeballworld]

Why did my father never fucking love me? Was I not the child he wanted? Was there something "missing" in me that he sensed was not there at my birth? We have the same eyes. And yet he sees his son in wide black eyes of the animal behind our house. The animal that hurt me, while he did nothing. And when I hurt it, I became nothing. Bucephalus. My brother, in a way. Cain and Abel, you and I. Your blood will stain my field and I will look my father in the eyes and ask "Am I my brother's keeper?" Even then he would choose you. To be loved less than the rotting carcase of a horse does something strange to a man. I take comfort in soft objects, the symbols of the affection he used to give.

#prose

[eyeballworld]

הבל | hevel

This is how it goes: God whispers in Cain’s jealous ear, drawing his attention to the Sin crouched at his doorway. Sin has haunted eyes and a mouth that has been kissed. Let there be no doubt that Sin has been kissed, with a wet-red mouth that may taste of blood or pomegranate or the electric crackle of a stoplight. Cain looks at Sin. He runs his tongue over his teeth.

This is how it goes: Cain leaves the house at one am in bare feet and a hoodie, careful to avoid the last stair that creaks, and treks out into the Field. There are many fields in the world but there is only one Field. Cain feels the difference in the grass when he crosses the border from field to Field, the way the grey-green blades stand up at attention in his wake, the way the dirt turns ice-cold and furious beneath his heels. The earth is good with foreshadowing. The tree of Knowledge has deep roots.

This is how it goes: God says, I will take you or your brother.

God says, You get to choose.

And Cain says, “When you split me and my brother in the womb, you did not divide us evenly. He got kindness, and I got longing. He got complacence, and I got ambition. I want to kill him sometimes. I think sometimes he wants to die.”

I have never made brothers before, God explains. That is how I thought they were made. What more do you want?

“I want to steal some of his kindness,” Cain says, and shakes his pocket knife out of his sleeve.

Back at home, Abel sits up in his bed with a start, heart racing. That was close, he thinks, that was a damn close one, and does not know why.

In the Field, the ground warms as blood seeps into the dirt. 

#this is gorgeous #favorite #prose

[eyeballworld]

“We are more than what was done to us; we are who we’ve become in spite of it all.”

— aja monet, “Foreword: Love is Older Than ‘Israel’” in Rifqa by Mohammed El-Kurd

#quote

[eyeballworld]

“When Mary Magdalene meets the resurrected Jesus, she looks right at him, but does not recognize him, “supposing him to be a gardener.” Only when he addresses her does she realize who he is. She turns toward him. John does not describe the action, only the dialogue, so it is left to us to imagine what leads Jesus to say, in the Latin that has become metonym for the scene as a whole, Noli me tangere, usually translated as “do not touch me” or “do not hold me.” The noli me tangere encounter is another one artists cannot resist. There are myriad arrangements of Jesus and Mary Magdalene: his hand stretches out in refusal, she kneels, he bends, they both stand, they look at each other, one looks away. Almost always she reaches for him. Sometimes she makes contact. The multitude of portraits reflects the ambiguity of the simple phrase, which opens a range of possible relations. Perhaps he rejects her touch because he cannot bear the shock of intimacy, divided as they are by the fact of the resurrection. Perhaps, even as he speaks, he touches her, to hold her away from him. It’s possible, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy argues, to translate the phrase as “do not wish to touch me.” If you do, then it becomes an exhortation to love the death too, because it is intrinsic to every life. Meanwhile, Mary’s hands hang in the air. Resurrection is Dante’s eternal rotation, “spurred on by flaming love”: it is the ongoing allegiance to keeping in sight the appearance of disappearance. It is living as if. It is a game of hands, an everlasting reaching after what escapes, what you love.”

— Elisa Gonzalez, in “Minor Resurrections: On failing to raise the dead”

#excerpt #favorite

[eyeballworld]

— November 7, 1921 / Franz Kafka diaries

#quote #franz kafka

[eyeballworld]

#isekai omotenashi gohan #manga cap #monochrome anime #my post

[eyeballworld]

Hey, Hachi… No matter how much or how often people hurt eachother, loving someone is never a waste.

— Nana Osaki, Nana

#quote #anime quote #manga quote #nana anime #nana manga #my post

[eyeballworld]

It lingers for your whole life, Katie Maria

#poetry

[eyeballworld]

When you are not fed love on a silver spoon you learn to lick it off knives.

— Lauren Eden

#quote

[eyeballworld]

YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK! YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK! YOU CAN BITE AND SCRATCH AND BEG BUT YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK!

#text post

[eyeballworld]

Yeah, they should’ve treated you better. They should’ve cared more. But they didn’t and they don’t, and your life keeps moving forward.

#text post #favorite

[eyeballworld]

“I want to talk about what happened without mentioning how much it hurt. There has to be a way. To care for the wounds without reopening them. To name the pain without inviting it back into me.”

— Lora Mathis, If There’s A Way Out I’ll Take It (via wnq-writers)

#quote #favorite

[eyeballworld]

“I am trying to make myself digestible. I am trying to make myself easy to love.”

— I.B. Vyache, Conversations Over Sanguinaccio Dolce

#quote

[eyeballworld]

there is a deep pathological sadness and loneliness you just can’t shake off that comes from having a traumatic childhood and broken family which I still haven’t come to terms with

#text post

[eyeballworld]

do you ever think oh actually i am never going to stop being eleven years old and lonely

#text post #favorite

[eyeballworld]

having so much love in your heart is beautiful and amazing right up until you’re alone in your bedroom clutching at your chest and whimpering like a wounded dog

#text post