Bacchanale, 1871, Lawrence Alma-Tadema

a master-list of dark academia posts

Dark Academia Moodboards

sometimes we all need to stay up all night, listening to classical music, discussing art and poetry, drinking red wine, while looking at the moon

took Dorian Grey to work with me today 

Study Motivations

The Picture of Dorian Grey

The Secret History characters

General Dark Academia

Dark Academia in various medias masterpost

Favourite love letters

Seeking employment

Perfume associations

Thoughts on writing

do you ever

The Dead Poets Society

Pacific Rim

Donna Tartt

Unintentional talent

i have the urge

adventure-core

reblog if

Guide To Dark Academia

three steps how to become mysterious and weird

become who you’ve dreamed of being

Why people are fond of Dark Academia

Dark Academia Lifestyle

How To Get Your Life Back Together

Dark Academia ask game

On limiting yourself to a single aesthetic

Cute date ideas

Getting into dark academia

Finding Yourself

Dark Notes

Little things to do

How to explore castles

Little ways

Improve yourself through DA

The Problem With DA

Aesthetic Text Posts

i want it to be fall again

Agatha Christie quotes

Work-class academic

i wanna be an anthropologist

Raw Florence & The Machine Quotes

i love wax seals

do we ever get the urge to

If We Were Villains

Date a boy who…

strange discoveries

future me

i deeply desire

the witch trials aren’t a gimmick

i’m sick of not having

keen on rural gothic

An excerpt

i want to write…

I’ve decided to practice witchcraft

hell hath no fury

dreaming about dark academia

regarding Frankenstein

i wish there was a checklist

excerpt

Philip Lombard

menswear

book club

ghostcore

poetry

something to think about

in the mood to be

does anyone feel like

Types Of…

types of academics

The Secret History characters

catholic art

Seasons Girls

decades

types of people as planets

as seasons

Music

Literary playlists

Dark Academia songs

Aesthetics/People as Queen albums

literature playlists

Great DA Blogs

@polymathwrath

@x-carpe-o-noctem-x

@sanguineoath

@thoughtcriminals

@thehistory

@sunkengardens-drowningbooks

I recommend constructing a detailed image of who you want to be and how you want your life to be, down to all the details (love-life, work, money, your home, day to day life, etc). Flesh it out fully and let your heart and desires govern the whole thing, don’t hold back at all, create your ideal life. And everyday think about it - and feel it. Feel it as if your life is already that way. And make all your decisions according to its ultimate fulfillment. Get in touch with your values, what’s really important to you, and let them guide you.

“In films, we are voyeurs, but in novels, we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person’s soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And this is why sometimes, when we put down a book, we find ourselves slightly altered as human beings. Novels change us from within.”

— Donna Tartt, in this 2013 interview by Laurie Grassi for Chatelaine (via boykeats)

Kallikteros, tr. by Willis Barnstone, from Greek Lyric Poetry; “A Way to the Heart,”

types of dark academics

the romantic: is in love with either someone from the French Revolution or with a fictional character; thought Hamlet was boring until Ophelia came in; would die for each and every single of the Dead Poets Society guys (except Cameron); reads sonnets at night and tries to memorize them for future conversations; Brontë; hates coffee, drinks at least three cups of cheap earl grey everyday; writes but you’ll never read it; allergic to Instagram poetry.

the scholar: is fluent in either Greek, Latin or French, probably downloaded duolingo for that purpose; has to drink coffee to function but never iced; gags for Lord Byron, Whitman and Shakespeare; is taking philosophy, regrets not taking literature; sucker for history; typewriters; tweed jackets; Oxford shoes; dark lipstick; everyone’s convinced they’ve murdered someone; listens to classical music exclusively.

the artist: wants to share art but always chickens out last minute; handwriting so elaborate it’s illegible; hates analyzing books but loves reading them; terrible poetry in notes app; patterned ties with every outfit; art galleries on Sundays; wants to live inside The Secret History and If We Were Villains; identifies Oscar Wilde as their father; shirts with the POOFIEST sleeves; has written a love letter at least thrice; would totally buy art pieces if they had money.

the dreamer: writes messages on their desk then exchanges messages with people who write on the same desk; words, phrases, definitions in smudged ink on hands; daydreaming while listening to piano music; has started reading 100 books in the last year, has finished 7; Romeo and Juliet is their favorite Shakespeare work; Emily Dickinson; Pride and Prejudice; dainty jewelry with sweaters and plaid skirts; beautiful notes for everything except maths.

“Dionysus is a god who takes human form, a powerful male who looks soft and feminine, a native of Thebes who dresses as a foreigner. His parentage is mixed between divine and human; he is and is not a citizen of Thebes; his power has both feminine and masculine aspects. He does not merely cross boundaries, he blurs and confounds them, makes nonsense of the lines between Greek and foreign, between female and male, between powerful and weak, between savage and civilized. He is the god of both tragedy and comedy, and in his presence the distinction between them falls away, as both comedy and tragedy…”

— Paul Woodruff, The Bacchae (Translated and Annotated) 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | We Should All Be Feminists | 2014

“The light of a candle

is transferred to another candle—

spring twilight”

- Yosa Buson

- Yosa Buson

i often feel like one of the many reasons why we are so passionate about the whole dark academia thing is because it gives us the opportunity to live in a fantasy where our passion, whether that’s literature, art, theater, science, feels valid.

we live in a world where we are constantly stimulated, constantly finding new things, constantly pressured into liking more and more stuff because the world keeps going on at such a fast pace and it never stops and it’s so hard to keep up with it and it makes your breath short your mind tired your fears bigger and.

it almost feels like we are trapped because even though we would like to slow down for a bit, we know the world won’t stop with us, for us.

if we turn our phones off it’s unnatural and people start worrying, if we don’t check our social medias during our study breaks we get anxious – no matter how much we want it not to be that way, no matter how badly we would like to dedicate ourselves completely to these passions of ours, we can’t do it entirely, slaves of times so flourishing but so scary. the world has a crushing weight and most of the times we soccombe to it.

therefore, thinking about the dark academia concept is a way of finding comfort not only in our own minds but even on this tiny corner of the internet.

in a certain way the concept softens me, although it can often be extreme.

gathering in the common room at three in the morning, a circle of eager friends with the same thirst for knowledge; the sound of a pen scribbling ideas on a thin sheet of paper; round glasses slipping down the tip of our noses always hidden by the pages of novels and poetry collections; dim lights caressing our backs curved from studying for so many hours those same subjects that make our heart race increase; our stray black cats resting on our bellies as we curl up in bed, notes spread out all around us – on the floor, glued to a wall, in between the pages of big tomes; the rain gently tapping against the window of our dorm rooms as we sit with our backs against the wooden wall, completely lost in between crinkled words with no cellphone, no distraction other than the characters and philosophers speaking to us in ancient languages, voices sweet as honey; our minds getting poisoned as we start to believe in those revolutions so badly we’re willing to lose our sanity after them; having lessons with just a bunch of other people, tea burning our tongues as it runs hot down our throats; and then, when the line between reality and fiction blurs completely, we might lose ourselves – but we wouldn’t feel guilty in the comfort we find when our love for knowledge becomes so warm it eventually starts to burn our skin. God, how sweet it feels to become ashes for these passions of us.

A Dark Academic’s Guide to Recovery

Lending yourself to an ancient and forbidden ritual, offering yourself to the pure-selfishness of pulling the roots from underneath you and replanting them again in the wet and dark soil. To feel the candlelight flicker on your lips as you recite an ode to yourself and the divinity within your fingertips. 

Indulge in dark literature. Consume the words with a hunger that becomes insatiable, drinking the stories that haunt your bones like wine brewed from the Cask of Amontillado. 

Accept that thoughts will cut through your mind, and respond to them with poetry. Respond to self-deprecation with powerful epigrams, for you are Aphrodite, and you bend the wills of men, as jasmine flows from your voice; untouchable from cusp of mortality. 

Wear a locket and fill it’s silver lining with a horcrux: a dried petal of the rose from a lover, the black and white photographs of handsome and deceased monarchs or scholars, and the captured air of autumn’s first kiss.

Adore the moon and the moon alone, for you are born from her celestial dust, and you will return to her in your late night walks outside the walls of your favourite library. 

Collapse on the hillside moor and scream into the air as though you were in Wuthering Heights, falling and crying into the heather and dew, releasing the anxieties and fears that only the earth will hear. She will comfort you more than tracing the wet ink along your parchment.