the place where love remains

reading the collected letters of shirley jackson and this is from a letter to her agent while she was working on the haunting of hill house

RIVALS (2024-)

had a realization about persuasion today that the reason Anne can’t move on for 8 long years is not just her own sorrow but the fear that he will and can and does hate her for what she did to him. I think that fear and then that realization that it’s true settles into her bones and freezes her up and she can’t get past it. I’ve always felt really deeply (without understanding why) that Anne recovers from her heartbreak before we think she does, that before everything reaches its resolution between them at the end of the book Anne is better than she was before—less frozen, less traumatized. That it’s not his declaration that changes things, but something earlier.

And I never really understood it before now but I think it’s because she has proof that he doesn’t hate her. At first she sees that he’s still angry (and because she’s Anne doesn’t really take that as the triumph she could have, as a testament to the power of how deeply she affected him, but is instead pained by it) but when he’s kind to her in spite of it, when he pays attention to her well-being and looks out for her in these small but particular ways, she responds to it with this humble gratitude because she’s been set free from the guilt that’s been holding her captive for so long. She never imagines that anything else will happen between them, that he’ll pay any attention to her romantically. She knows she blew that chance long ago, but she’s so relieved to know that he doesn’t hate her that it’s almost enough and at least is definitively better than it was before. The wound that’s been eating away at her wasn’t her own pain, not really, but his, and then her pain at the thought that he was alive in the world hating her for causing him that pain. That’s a special kind of twisted torment to live with and to watch it be undone by acts of gentleness and kindness—even if the doer of them is still sometimes begrudging and resentful, to watch her be able to breathe again after 8 years of holding her breath is very soft and it makes me cry.

THE OTHERS — (2001) dir. Alejandro Amenábar

I find it strangely fitting that Edgar Allan Poe is rarely celebrated on his birthday...but he seems to be on his death day.

Perhaps he would find that amusing.

A man who spent most of his life destitute and in agony, emotionally and physically. Who refused to compromise who he was, and insisted he could make money off his 'strange, dark poems' while simultaneously chasing and shunning all the readers who actually had money to fund his endeavors. Always at odds with genre, while inventing new ones. Never quite 'happy' but eternally passionate.

He must have been an interesting person to be around, and the few letters we have from his friends say he was. Even those who hotly debated him on writing and went out of their way to sabotage him on occasion seemed to enjoy conversation with him.

Never mind how he was a rarity among writers even then. Living entirely off his writing, even if he was barely living most of the time.

What a delightfully appropriate topic he is on dreary autumn days when everything feels quiet, cold and a touch too hopeless.

✨Pretty floor mosaics✨

@pscentral​ event 31: faceless ↳ JANE EYRE (2006)

FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA (2024) dir. George Miller

1934-2024

selynn lee

"I disappear, I cease to exist and it's lovely"

link | archive

“The geneticist Jim Wilson, at the University of Edinburgh, was shocked by the frequency he found in the U.K. Biobank, an anonymized research database: One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child. “That’s way, way more than I think many people would ever imagine,” he told me. And this number is just a floor: It reflects only the cases that resulted in pregnancy, that did not end in miscarriage or abortion, and that led to the birth of a child who grew into an adult who volunteered for a research study.”

"In the overwhelming majority of cases, Moore told me, the parents are a father and a daughter or an older brother and a younger sister, meaning a child’s existence was likely evidence of sexual abuse."

INTO THE RING (2020)

GOLDEN GLOBE WINNERS <3