Finished Christian Petzold's Phoenix today, and MY GOD. It's easily his best work, and everyone involved was beyond excellent. Unbelievable film.

Currently trying to read up on the history of the Ancien Régime between 1500 and 1750/1800. Here are seven texts I have for the purpose:

Idc how much of a man you think you are, you WILL cry over Nick Drake

I can proudly announce that my affliction has torn me asunder.

Being sick with desire tends to entail being sick of having that desire. Things would be easier if it vanished, yet I feel a curious shame for thinking this.

Another certified Hayes BANGER after what just happened

Everyone adores Arnold Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, yet I seldom hear commentary on the poem that partly inspired it, Richard Dehmel's poem of the same name. Translated as "Transfigured Night," the poem concerns a man's acceptance of his lover's pregnancy—by another man.

*Bringing Out the Dead* is now my favorite Scorsese film, just for the monologues alone. There's also a shot when they show some books that I assume inspire the film. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, W. Somerset Maugham, Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Percy Bysshe Shelley are shown.

Bluesky is an Eco chamber

So my generation (gen Z) has a lot of people that just never had this (including myself), that are now in our 20s. I do wonder if a first love in someone's 20s will have the same effect, or if life at that age is just fundamentally opposed to the unwavering, impetuous intensity that young love has.

"Picturing the austral territories and everything separating you from them is futile from the moment that the airplane can take you there in twenty hours."
- The Ecstasy of Communication

In the early hours yesterday, I sat in an almost total stillness, and realized that I could only have read a physical book in that atmosphere. A screen would have legitimately ruined everything.

When a work of history begins with a tangential opening like this, I trust the author more. Good history is a narrative like any other, and often the greatest historians don't hide their literary sensibilities.

I often contemplate this one, especially in the time of "automated reasoning." We once (arrogantly) considered reason as our divine endowment, setting us apart from nature in the image of God himself. Now we abdicate both the work and responsibility of it to slavish automata. Divine automata?