Goethe has said, that in youth we cannot be happy unless we love. I did not love; but I was devoured by a restless wish to be something to others.
Mary Shelley, from The Last Man. (via weepforadonais)
mum
here's a proposal, a film about the Romantics starring the cast of 2010s snl.
Kristen Wiig as Mary Shelley, John Mulaney as Percy Shelley, Bill Hader as Lord Byron, Pete Davidson (in a wig) as John Keats (I'd pay to see that tbh) and Vanessa Bayer as Claire Clairmont
bonus points for Nick Kroll as John Polidori and Seth Meyers as Wordsworth
Real talk, as a teacher in England I can confirm that the British government does everything and anything to avoid teaching the true extent of colonial history to English kids.
You ask a modern English teenager about Northern Ireland and they probably can’t tell you about fucking anything currently going on there bar ‘I think we weren’t nice to them’, and that’s the country next fucking door so you know they don’t know shit about India or the Middle East.
The English government PURPOSEFULLY does not teach English children the real in’s and out’s of the British Empire despite a recent call to ‘widen the breadth of our curriculum’ because then where would our football hooligans who defend statues come from?
Have a good conversation with any bald headed English bloke wearing an England football shirt with an EDL tattoo and test his knowledge of the Empire he loves so much. 100 quid he knows fuck all beyond ‘we civilized those people!’
And this is why no one fucking likes us, because there’s no active effort to teach our younger generations why we were wrong or how to make things better, but there’s a clear educational agenda to shield young English children from any extensive criticism of England.
I’ve started a blog, because why not. Here it is. I’ve started it.
anerican choese
from Virginia Woolf’s diaries, February 27th, 1926
2003 // 2015
If you mourn the death of ancient languages but do not mourn the death of innocent black people, you need to reevaluate your priorities.
If the burning of the library of Alexandria or of Notre Dame brings you to tears but do not care about the fires started by desperate and grieving protesters demanding justice, you need to reevaluate your priorities.
It is okay to love and be passionate about things from the past, but we must also care about our present. 2020 will someday be history too. Don’t let yourself be on the wrong side of history. Don’t ignore the racial injustice that is all around us.
-Wendla Bergmann.
This always makes me cry when she says it.
By me <3
i killed a plant once because i gave it too much water. lord, i worry that love is violence.
— José Olivarez, from “Getting Ready to Say I Love You to My Dad, It Rains,” Citizen Illegal