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saturday.
I've started on A Woman Appeared to Me again, a semi-biographical novel by Renée Vivien who was a symbolist/lesbian/feminist writer from the early 20th century (AWAtM was published in 1904) that I to this day cannot remember how I learned about, probably Wikipedia scrolling, tbh, but anyway - at one point during my manic twenties, I managed to get my hands on an English translation, until recently the only one in circulation, by the Naiad Press. In recent years, both AWAtM and some of her poetry and short stories have been translated into English and I've put those books on my wishlist for X-mas, hoping I'll get some if not all of them. I love her very flavourful, in some ways purple prose and I love the Symbolist style in general, it's right up my alley. Humility was probably vaguely inspired by Vivien.
I have an RP character from around this time period, Germaine Dupont, and she's a writer. One of the books I've headcanon'ed that she has written is a novel called, The Faithless, described as such on her profile: The story of two girls, bosom buddies, who believe in the same story of guardian angels, but as they grow older, only one retains the belief, while the other outgrows it and resultantly, they outgrow each other. The girl who did not give up her faith is visited, in the end, by her guardian angel. And this summary gave me an idea for a story I could write, set in the same time and maybe written in something akin to the Symbolist idiom. It could be a fun challenge. So, I made an RP character for that, journal named in honour of A Woman Appeared to Me.
I need to read up on angelology, though, for this to work, so I might look a bit into that later tonight. (Spoiler: I'm looking it up now)...
I've had some trouble picking out music today. Normally I know almost exactly what I'm in the mood for, but today I needed something classical that wasn't either too dramatic or too introspective, so none of my usual guys worked, re: Chopin or Debussy or Beethoven. However, I've followed the channel of a young French composer, contempoary, who composes very lovely music and one of his earliest compositions was a nocturne inspired by The Lady of the Camellias, followed by two other "Romantic Ladies" pieces, a waltz for Delphine de Girardin and an intermezzo for Marie d'Agoult. This recording is his own performance of all three. I really love these pieces and find them extremely soothing to listen to, so that's where I ended up today.
We're getting take-away tonight, still completely worn out by the flu. Still, we've been a little active today, so it's definitely getting better. It's snowed outside, so there's the thinnest powdery snow lying everywhere, so pretty.
I will leave you with a quote from A Woman Appeared to Me, it's from the prologue, introduced with a fragment of writing by a character called San Giovanni and it goes like this:
Friendship is more dangerous than love, since its roots are stronger and go deeper than the roots of love. The anguish of friendship is more bitter than the anguish of love. Certain souls love friendship as others love love; they suffer through friendship as others through love. They have in their lives only one friendship as others have but a single love. It is when they lose friendship that they despair hopelessly. And it is when they despair thus that they find happiness. For happiness is like the magnificence of ruins.
How beautiful is that?
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I relate to this a lot, being somewhere on the aro spectrum. My deepest interpersonal losses have all been friendships more than relationships.
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And I can definitely understand the pain of losing a friendship. Although I have had very difficult friendships as an adult, some which have been a necessity to let go off, the biggest losses I suffered in my teens were all friendships and it was incredibly hard. It has taught me a lot and it's something I reflect upon still.