Still #goals

[breathedout]

I want to stay here forever. I want to eat nothing but omelettes and café au lait. I want never to go out. I want to dream about copulations in the night, and write about them in the day, or vice versa, or both at the same time. I want to remember everything, and hope for nothing, and I want to die a hundred years hence, with a volume of Voltaire under my pillow, and the ghost of an erection still lingering between the sheets.

—Lytton Strachey, letter to Leonard Woolf, March 1 1906, from Genoa

I'm working on archiving my old reading posts from Tumblr. Most of them will be marked "Don't display on reading page" so as not to clog up people's dashes, but I may include the first post from each work/author as an advertisement/walk down memory lane. Head over to my main page for more Strachey (or whatever author I'm currently archiving). Beyond tagging with the year read, I'm not making any effort to replicate original dates of these Tumblr posts; that is just too much work, and I have dated reading records offline. All I really care about is maintaining my commonplace book of quotes & commentary.

Comments

[fennishjournal]

That's a lovely quote! I so like reading other people's letters.

I recently tried reading the letters between Virginia and Vita but am finding them rather incomprehensible because of all the people and events I know nothing about.

[breathedout]

Yeah I came to the Bloomsberries through Virginia Woolf, but I actually tend to recommend (I love that I have a protocol for this) that people start with Lytton's letters, because he is SUCH a gossip that they give a more reader-friendly introduction to the peer group. Plus he was actually at Cambridge when this whole little cadre was coming together, whereas Virginia was always, to her profoundly mixed emotions, an outsider.

It's definitely a learning curve, though, especially what with all the tangled web of marriages, love affairs, and casual flings. I adore the Vita/Virginia letters; I'm sure I'll be porting passages from them over here as well.

[fennishjournal]

I might have to get Lytton's letters, then!
I wanted to start with Virginia Woolf because I adore her writing so, but what you say makes a lot of sense.

[ordinarybirds]

I'm not sure how this is gonna read, but it's a subset of whisperspace: I don't have anything clever to add, but were this tumblr I would reblog this with vague tags so I could find it easily without betraying any of the associated emotions. This is a Good Post.

[breathedout]

Ha, thank you! Lytton never fails to cheer me up.

[greywash]

or vice versa, or both at the same time ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

[breathedout]

My other favorite Lytton rediscovery: "He seems to live in a sort of futile complacent dream made up of incorrect Greek derivations."