Having made an utter failure of my life, I found myself one day, in the midst of my poverty and wretchedness, thinking about the female companions of my youth. As I went over them one by one, examining and comparing them in my mind’s eye, it suddenly came over me that those slips of girls - which is all they were then - were in every way, both morally and intellectually, superior to the ‘grave and mustachioed signoir’ I am now supposed to have become. The realization brought with it an overpowering sense of shame and remorse, and for a while I was plunged in the deepest despair. There and then I resolved to make a record of all the recollections of those days I could muster - those golden days when I dressed in silk and ate delicately, when we were still nestled in the protecting shadow of the Ancestors and Heaven still smiled on us. I resolved to tell the world how, in defiance of all my family’s attempts to bring me up properly and all the warnings and advice of my friends, I had brought myself to this present wretched state, in which, having frittered away half a lifetime, I find myself without a single skill with which I could earn a decent living. I resolved that, however unsightly my own shortcomings might be, I must not, for the sake of keeping them hid, allow those wonderful girls to pass into oblivion without a memorial.
Reminders of my poverty were all about me: the thatched roof, the wicker lattices, the string beds, the crockery stove. But these did not need to be an impediment to the workings of the imagination. Indeed, the beauties of nature outside my door - the morning breeze, the evening dew, the flowers and trees of my garden - were a positive encouragement to write. I might lack learning and literary aptitude, but what was to prevent me from turning it all into a story and writing it in the vernacular? In this way the memorial to my beloved girls could at once and the same time serve as a source of harmless entertainment and as a warning to those who were in the same predicament as myself but who were still in need of awakenings.
The question as to whether or not the Bao-yu of the novel is a portrait of the author as a boy will be dealt with later; but certainly this dejected middle-aged man who concludes that the girls he had known in his youth were all ‘morally and intellectually [his] superior’ has a good deal in common with the adolescent who thought that ‘the pure essence of humanity was all concentrated in the female of the species and that males were its mere dregs and off-scourings’, who once observed of his female cousins that ‘if they, whose understanding was so superior, were manifestly still so far from Enlightenment, it was obviously a waste of time for him to go on pursuing it’, and who, when he was a very little boy, used to maintain that ‘girls are made of water and boys are made of mud’, and that only when he was with girls did he feel ‘fresh and clean’.
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When in the depth of the winter, a full hundred miles from the nearest land, one sees a loon in the path of a steamer, listens to its weird, maniacal laughter, and sees it slowly sink downward through the green waters, it truly seems a hint of the bird-life of long-past ages.
Protobirds were some spooky motherfuckers? I guess?
Just another PSA for white queers,
appropriating trans*/non-binary/genderfucking terms from native cultures is not okay
if you’re too blinded by your queerness to understand that you’re being colonialist and oppressive i would like you to completely stop everything now and forever
ლ(╹◡╹ლ)
stop forever
Does this mean like, calling yourself a “two-spirit”? Is it still OK to bring up those sorts of things in discussion, as in “no trans* people aren’t totally new, for example the Two-Spirits are an example of nonbinary gender roles” or so?
(Source: dweeb-prince, via jethroq)
A no less wonderful structure is composed by a sort of spiders, natives of the tropics and the south of Europe, which have been justly called mason-spiders by M. Latreille. One of these (Mygale nidulans, WALCKN.), found in the West Indies, ” digs a hole in the earth obliquely downwards about three inches in length, and one in diameter. This cavity she lines with a tough thick web, which, when taken out, resembles a leathern purse ; but, what is most curious, this house has a door with hinges, like the operculum of some sea-shells, and herself and family, who tenant this nest, open and shut the door whenever they pass and repass. This history was told me,” says Darwin,” and the nest, with its door, shown me by the late Dr. Butt, of Bath, who was some years physician in Jamaica.”(Zoonomia, i. 253, 8 vo. ed.)
I am bewildered for several reasons.
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yes, KNOW the motherfucking difference.
Just because there are Chechen terrorists does not mean ALL CHECHENS are bad! Russians are not inherently better than another race nor is any other race so I won’t condone a statement like this. Chechens are citizens of the Russian Federation whether you or they like it or not. :/ This is coming from a Russian Slavic woman.
So yes, know the motherfucking difference between terrorists and Normal Chechens. When are the majority of human beings going to be able to gain the cognitive skill of differentiation between a single person and a group of people? I would have thought that skill developed in every human a long time ago lol….
Also, Russia has a population of ~150 mil. people, while Chechnya has 1,2 mil. people.
Russia is a historically large empire that built St. Petersburg and Moscow on the expense of the large tracts of land under thier control, with very little interest in developing outside the two major cities. Comparing Russia to Chechnya is like comparing whole of America to New Mexico.
Also, as for high culture from Chechnya v. high culture from russia; you are aware that both the Czars, and Stalin were extremely hostile towards small nations in Russia getting uppity about their own identity, and Stalin made sure to wipe even remnant of that out by systematically executing the intelligencia of minority nationalities.
Anyway, a PSA for Americans; this is what Russian racism looks like. Caucasian is a slur in Russia, it refers to the mostly Muslim people from the Caucasus region, and they are target of systematic and street level harassment in Russia.
It was worse than a purge of intelligentsia. The tsar ordered genocide of many Caucasus peoples (not primarily Chechens, but being a secondary target isn’t much of a consolation); and that was of course after an outright war with them. Stalin of course sent NKVD around with flamethrowers and MGs to kill everybody, and “resettled” hundreds of thousands.
This is such racist garbage.
Possibly related note, Tolstoy’s last novel was about an Avar commander. I don’t know how racist it is, but he apparently did plenty of research.
Anonymous asked: It's not spam.
Sorry. It’s difficult to imagine anyone looking up to me, though, or finding me very confusing beyond the veneer.