I should be the mist that shrouds the mountain range around you

Chased out with the winter when the spring comes in

You should have let me fade

And be separated particle by particle swirling in the ocean waves

Bodies aimless drifting without end again

Shapeless as the day that we first met

mouse on the keys - Shapeless Man (feat. Jordan Dreyer of La Dispute)

The day you start living in another country, you are no longer a tourist or a traveler, but you are not a native either. You become something in between your old life and your new one.

And it doesn't matter how long you go for or if you come back. You'll always be part of the collective who have lived this unique experience and know all too well the feeling of belonging and not really belonging. Of living within the in between and knowing that both feeling homesick and at home, comfort and the unknown, can exist at the same time.

Emme Sait

Naoki Ito, Urban Nature (2009)

Bertel Thorvaldsen, Cupid and Hymen

Taylor Jenkins Read, One True Loves

Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag 2.03

Fleet Foxes - Someone You'd Admire

[...]Amor and Psyche. There was nothing common about it. An absolute classic—full and harmonious. And for all that, fascinatingly new. It was fresh, but not frenetic. It was floral, without being unctuous. It possessed depth, splendid, abiding, voluptuous, rich brown depth—and yet was not in the least excessive or bombastic.

[...]"It has a cheerful character, it's charming, it's like a melody, puts you in a good mood at once....What nonsense, good mood!" And he flung the handkerchief back onto his desk in anger, turned away, and walked to the farthest corner of the room, as if ashamed of his enthusiasm.

Ridiculous! Letting himself be swept up in such eulogies—"like a melody, cheerful, wonderful, good mood." How idiotic. Childishly idiotic. A moment's impression. An old weakness. A matter of temperament.

[...]But you[...]are not going to be fooled. You were surprised for a moment by your first impression of this concoction. But do you know how it will smell an hour from now when its volatile ingredients have fled and the central structure emerges? Or how it will smell this evening when all that is still perceptible are the heavy, dark components that now lie in odorous twilight beneath a veil of flowers? Wait and see...!

The second rule is: perfume lives in time; it has its youth, its maturity, and its old age. And only if it gives off a scent equally pleasant at all three different stages of its life, can it be called successful. How often have we not discovered that a mixture that smelled delightfully fresh when first tested, after a brief interval was more like rotten fruit, and finally reeked of nothing but the pure civet we had used too much of. Utmost caution with the civet! One drop too much brings catastrophe. An old source of error. Who knows—perhaps Pélissier got carried away with the civet. Perhaps by this evening all that's left of his ambitious Amor and Psyche will just be a whiff of cat piss. We shall see.

[...]Just as a sharp ax can split a log into tiny splinters, our nose will fragment every detail of this perfume. And then it will be only too apparent that this ostensibly magical scent was created by the most ordinary, familiar methods. We...shall catch Pélissier, the vinegar man, at his tricks. We shall rip the mask from his ugly face[...]

Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

My faith is stronger than your agonies
Hope survives your pain

Joelle - Village and Void

undercover, autumn/winter 2017

A much closer modern analogue to the Buddhist treatment of self-contempt can be found in the psychoanalytic literature, which, like the Therava¯din texts, suggests that self-loathing and pride are part of the same system. Karen Horney argues that "pride and self-hate are actually one entity". Vicious self-accusations "stem from neurotic pride and express the discontent of the proud self with the individual's not measuring up to its require- ments". Pride builds up an idealized self and then castigates the actual self for falling far short of it. Moreover, self-contempt is not a matter of true knowledge of the self, but rather an alienation from it.

Self-loathing, while it involves a rather perverse form of self-construction, is like other voices to oneself, based ultimately in conceit and manufactured by desire; there is a subtle desire and agency at work in even our negative self-formulations.

Maria Heim, The Conceit of Self-Loathing