Where are my Dark Academia friends at? The Secret History and dark academia obviously go hand in hand and trust us when we say; these words can summon an entire fandom, an entire group of intelligent, curious minds that read Shakespeare and classics for fun. We love words and you must too if you’re lurking on the internet reading this article when you should be sleeping.
TSH was a hard read for us but we can’t deny the fact that it was fun to see these characters doing unimaginable things and trying to get away with it. Moreover, it was written so beautifully that we ended up annotating half our copy. That book is thick and if you want to relive that experience, then here are some of our favorite quotes from that book.
But, if you haven’t read that book, and are just curious, then let us use this chance to convince you to pick that book right now. TSH follows a group of students who dream of living life to the fullest. A group of clever and eccentric misfits, these students study at an elite New England college. When they discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from normal life, they go beyond the boundaries of “normal”. However, everything has consequences, and when they slip, they move from obsession to corruption to betrayal, and at last into evil. In short, it’s chaotic and very dark academia; perfect for all of us!
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But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another.
I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time.
I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.
Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw’, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.
‘If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective,’ I said, ‘I think romantics are frequently the best classicists.’
The great romantics are often failed classicists.
For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless.
I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.
I believe that having a great diversity of teachers is harmful and confusing for a young mind, in the same way I believe that it is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
‘Death is the mother of beauty,’ said Henry. ‘And what is beauty?’ ‘Terror.’
Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.
‘And if beauty is terror,’ said Julian, ‘then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?’ ‘To live,’ said Camilla. ‘To live forever,’ said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.
‘We don’t like to admit it,’ said Julian, ‘but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything.
Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
‘Should I do what is necessary?’ ‘You should only, ever, do what is necessary.’
Nothing is lonelier or more disorienting than insomnia.
I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone’s life when character is fixed forever.
If I threw myself off, I thought, who would find me in all that white silence?
My life, which before had been only solitary and miserable, became unbearable.
‘Bunny’s never had a cent of pocket money the entire time I’ve known him,’ said Henry tartly. ‘And he has expensive tastes. That is unfortunate.’
I felt as though I were in the dining car of a train and had been seated by the steward with another solitary male traveller, some kindly stranger, someone who didn’t even speak my language, perhaps, but who was still content to eat his dinner with me, exuding an air of calm acceptance as if he’d known me all his life.
‘After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great,’ he said. ‘To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one’s moment of being.’
‘Things aren’t marvellous,’ said Henry, ‘but they could certainly be worse.’
I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.
One likes to think there’s something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I’ve learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn’t conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn’t know the language.
‘The more I hear about luxury barges, the less terrible death begins to seem,’ he said.
Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things – naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror – are too terrible to really ever grasp at all.
He was so perfectly at his ease that there was something palpably dishonest about it. I wondered why no one else, apparently, could see it.
He did touch people’s lives, the lives of strangers, in an entirely unanticipated way. It was they who really mourned him – or what they thought was him – with a grief that was no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.
Julian is like one of those people that’ll pick all his favourite chocolates out of the box and leave the rest.
‘Julian,’ he said curtly, ‘will never be a scholar of the very first rate, and that is because he is only capable of seeing things on a selective basis.’
‘There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty – unless she is wed to something more meaningful – is always superficial.
And I know I said earlier that he was perfect but he wasn’t perfect, far from it; he could be silly and vain and remote and often cruel and still we loved him, in spite of, because.
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