Jonathan Harker, Being Encompassed With Terrors That He Dare Not Think Of:

The Charioteer, Chapter 6: “Here if anywhere, he thought, was someone to whom he could release the pressure of so much uncommunicated experience, who would inevitably understand. He remembered how after Charles’s party, leaning out of his window long into the night, he had thought of Ralph; though it was already years since their brief meeting, the thought had supported him in his isolation.”

The Charioteer, Chapter 7: “Suddenly, as if the memory had been kept in storage especially for this, he saw with extraordinary vividness Ralph’s face against the background of the dismantled study. Ralph had been nineteen. And here was a grown man in wartime making such heavy weather of so little. Earlier today, during one of the current invasion rumours, Laurie had pictured an English Thermopylae...amid the last-ditch grimness of this vision there had intruded a vague exhilaration, and he realised that he had imagined Ralph beside him. So, but much more so, it was now, and with this sudden comfort he found he had got to the door, and was outside in the shelter of the corridor.”

When I came across the second of these sections, it reminded me of the first; I thought they were both very sweet.

cassandra just give alastair one (1) friend 😭😭

I hope Harry and Meghan name their daughter Diana so I can watch the monarchy collapse in real time.

Gustave Caillebotte (French, 1848-1894), Le Petit bras de la Seine à Argenteuil, c.1890. Oil on canvas, 81 x 62.3 cm.

If Alastair has made up with Jem, does that mean Jem will start visiting the Carstairs in COT whenever a Silent Brother is needed to check on Sona? Will he keep Alastair company? Will they eventually get to talk and Jem tells him all the things Elias should've told him years and years ago? Will they talk about Alastair and his role in caring for his new sibling and mother? Will they talk about Alastair in his younger years when he hated to bully but did it anyway and now doesn't know how to fix it? Will they talk about all the pain surrounding his father and his father's death?

Will Jem ask him about music? Or will Jem finally just let Alastair have someone - a friend - who he can gush to about being excited to have a new sibling? Someone to list off names to: all the names he thinks would be lovely for a boy and then all the names he thinks would be lovely for a girl and if Jem doesn't know what some mean or where they come from, Alastair translates them and they argue about which would fit better 🧐 I will sell my soul for this 😭

Alastair: Happy father’s day, I guess.  

Elias: You got me a present?  

Alastair: Yup, it’s a list of all your accomplishments as a father.

Elias: this is a blank sheet of paper.

Alastair: Yep.

people in period clothing doing modern things is my aesthetic

I forbid ye maidens all who let fly your lovely hair to go down to Carterhaugh for young Tam Lin is there

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), poem 85 from “The Gardener”, 1914 Translated by the author from the original Bengali. New York: The Macmillan Company.