This is Flannery O’Connor’s bedroom. It looks like a bedroom—it rings true. Apartment Therapy has posted photos of 15 other writer’s bedrooms, including Sylvia Plath’s, Ernest Hemingway’s, and Marcel Proust’s. Many don’t look like living spaces, but rather museum set-ups. Still, it’s interesting. (via Bookforum)
Rooms Of My Own.
My walls are still bare and the green tape separating wall from baseboard has yet to be stripped away. The kitchen desperately needs another coat of paint but I’ve misplaced the paint chip and now I can’t remember whether it was “Caribbean Spice” or “Harvest” that became the colour of my walls. There are still boxes that are only half unpacked and only just yesterday did I alphabetize my books, and I’ve been here a month. I’m missing tables and chairs and I’m sure plants and candles would make this place more mine.
For the first time in my life I’m living alone. No parents, no siblings or boyfriends or roommates. I live completely alone, and I love it. It’s in this past year that I’ve begun to accumulate quite adult characteristics. Besides moving out on my own, I have a nine to five job, I’m in a stable relationship, and I find myself catching up with friends over beers instead of study breaks. This will be short-lived - if I know anything about my future with certainty it’s that I will find myself a student again. But despite all these adult qualities that have begun to define me, moving into my own apartment makes me feel exactly how I felt when my Mom told me I could decorate my room however I wanted when I was thirteen. Those of you lucky souls who were always allowed to decorate your own bedrooms will not understand. Some of us had to plead, beg, and desperately convince our parents of our tasteful decor plans, outstanding characters, and pretty decent grades in order to paint our walls navy blue and buy a bright red comforter. (Those of you with younger siblings will further understand the silent betrayal of a younger sister who painted over those walls with lime green just five short years later.) Of course there are some differences. I now pay for everything myself and therefore decorating (especially without Mom’s taxi services) has become reduced to hand-me-down furniture and thrift store finds, and of course the obligatory Ikea trip once Mom is available to drive. Which I suppose is exactly how a recent graduate should live. But the feeling, that excitement of self-expression is the same one I felt when I only had a single bedroom to decorate instead of a whole apartment.
There’s something incredibly special about one’s bedroom as a teenager. It’s a very important haven, and most teenagers spend as much time as possible in their bedrooms. Bedrooms are made for secrets, and personal discoveries, for tears and angst, for gossip and for hiding - especially for hiding. A teenager’s bedroom - if they are lucky enough to decorate it themselves - is an expression of the self at a time when personal identity should be nothing other than confused. I still feel that confusion every once in a while, and these unpacked boxes and half painted walls seem to be reminding me at every turn that I don’t have everything I need, and things are, at this point in time, a little incomplete in more than just my apartment. And that is, sometimes, a disheartening realization.
The thing is though, this place already feels like home, and I need to keep reminding myself that this is a process - both decorating and being a young adult. This will come together. Even if somehow the walls end up lime green much too soon, this will have been a space that contributed to my own understanding of myself at a very important time in my life. People, especially young people, need spaces and black canvases to bounce off of.
The truth is, the important things are in order- I mean, just yesterday I alphabetized my books.
![millionsmillions:
“A marvelously sweet occupation it is to lie on one’s back in a wood and gaze upwards! You may fancy you are looking into a bottomless sea; that it stretches wide below you; that the trees are not rising out of the earth, but, like the roots of gigantic weeds, are dropping—falling straight down into those glassy, limpid depths; the leaves on the trees are at one moment transparent as emeralds, the next, they condense into golden, almost black green. Somewhere, afar off, at the end of a slender twig, a single leaf hangs motionless against the blue patch of transparent sky, and beside it another trembles with the motion of a fish on the line, as though moving of its own will, not shaken by the wind. Round white clouds float calmly across, and calmly pass away like submarine islands; and suddenly, all this ocean, this shining ether, these branches and leaves steeped in sunlight—all is rippling, quivering in fleeting brilliance, and a fresh trembling whisper awakens like the tiny, incessant splash of suddenly stirred eddies. One does not move—one looks, and no word can tell what peace, what joy, what sweetness reigns in the heart. One looks: the deep, pure blue stirs on one’s lips a smile, innocent as itself; like the clouds over the sky, and, as it were, with them, happy memories pass in slow procession over the soul, and still one fancies one’s gaze goes deeper and deeper, and draws one with it up into that peaceful, shining immensity, and that one cannot be brought back from that height, that depth …”
— Excerpted from Ivan Turgenev’s A Hunter’s Sketches, now available online thanks to Eldritch Press.
[Image]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lymrqr8iuG1r6xvfko1_500.jpg)
“A marvelously sweet occupation it is to lie on one’s back in a wood and gaze upwards! You may fancy you are looking into a bottomless sea; that it stretches wide below you; that the trees are not rising out of the earth, but, like the roots of gigantic weeds, are dropping—falling straight down into those glassy, limpid depths; the leaves on the trees are at one moment transparent as emeralds, the next, they condense into golden, almost black green. Somewhere, afar off, at the end of a slender twig, a single leaf hangs motionless against the blue patch of transparent sky, and beside it another trembles with the motion of a fish on the line, as though moving of its own will, not shaken by the wind. Round white clouds float calmly across, and calmly pass away like submarine islands; and suddenly, all this ocean, this shining ether, these branches and leaves steeped in sunlight—all is rippling, quivering in fleeting brilliance, and a fresh trembling whisper awakens like the tiny, incessant splash of suddenly stirred eddies. One does not move—one looks, and no word can tell what peace, what joy, what sweetness reigns in the heart. One looks: the deep, pure blue stirs on one’s lips a smile, innocent as itself; like the clouds over the sky, and, as it were, with them, happy memories pass in slow procession over the soul, and still one fancies one’s gaze goes deeper and deeper, and draws one with it up into that peaceful, shining immensity, and that one cannot be brought back from that height, that depth …”
— Excerpted from Ivan Turgenev’s A Hunter’s Sketches, now available online thanks to Eldritch Press.
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(Source: arseniclace)
(Source: serialstranger)
“Dear Sir,
I am writing to you to object to the word cremains, which was used by your representative when he met with my mother and me two days after my father’s death.
We had no objection to your representative, personally, who was respectful and friendly and dealt with us in a sensitive way. He did not try to sell us an expensive urn, for instance.
What startled and disturbed us was the word cremains. You in the business must have invented the word, and you are used to it. We the public do not hear it that often. We don’t lose a close friend or a family member very many times in our life, and years pass in between, if we are lucky. Even less often do we have to discuss what is to be done with a family member or close friend after their death.
We noticed that before the death of my father, you and your representative used the words loved one to refer to him. That was comfortable for us, even if the ways in which we loved him were complicated.
Then we were sitting there in our chairs in the living room trying not to weep in from of your representative, who was opposite us on the sofa, and we were very tired, first from sitting up with my father, and then worrying about whether he was comfortable as he was dying, and then from worrying about where he might be now that he was dead, and your representative referred to him as “the cremains.”
At first we did not even know what he meant. Then, when we realized, we were frankly upset. Cremains sounds like something invented as a milk substitute in coffee, like Cremora, or Coffee-mate. Or it sounds like some kind of a chipped-beef dish.
As one who works with words for a living, I must say that any invented word, like Porta Potti or pooper scooper, has a cheerful or even jovial ring to it that I don’t think you really intended when you invented the word cremains. In face, my father himself, who was a professor of English and is now being called the cremains, would have pointed out to you the alliteration in Porta Potti and the rhyme in pooper scooper. Then he would have told you that cremains falls into the same category as brunch and is known as a portmanteau word.
There is nothing wrong with inventing words, especially in a business. But a grieving family is not prepared for this one. We are not even used to our loved one being gone. You could very well continue to employ the term ashes. We are used to it from the Bible, and are even comforted by it. We would not misunderstand. We would know that these ashes are not like the ashes in a fireplace.
Yours Sincerely.”
Lydia Davis, “Letter to a Funeral Parlor”
” ‘Under the stars,’ she repeated. ‘I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to someone. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth.’
‘It was a dream,’ said John quietly. ‘Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.’
‘How pleasant then to be insane!’
‘So I’m told,’ said John gloomily. ‘I don’t know any longer. At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That’s a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion. Well I have that last and I will make the usual nothing of it.’ He shivered. ‘Turn up your coat collar, little girl, the night’s full of chill and you’ll get pneumonia. His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.’
So wrapping himself in his blanket he fell off to sleep.”
The Diamond as Big as The Ritz, F. Scott Fitzgerald
