Dude this is weird

punpunichu:

fffffff orthodox cross

stripesandteeth:

segastarlit:

HAAAA

get on my blog you kawaii dancing germans

(Source: jedthelollipopjackingfiend)

jiidesu:

ichimaru-taichou:

antagonistic-tentacles:

superkianagalaxy:

acelebritysbodypart:

tachithecervixcrusader:

ohmyachingsushi:

smallcutsensations:

Do yourself a favour. Click on the picture.

BADASSERY

holy fucking shit

excuse me i’m just SAVING THIS FOREVER

0.0

i am on the verge of tears i am so excited for this

Oh dear god. 

wizzard890:

“I have never been so little content with the state of my heart as in Jerusalem and afterwards.”

-Nikolai Gogol

For centuries, Jerusalem has had a unique pull on the faithful, calling them through its gates in search of redemption and spiritual rebirth. Countless pilgrims have come with the intention of being transformed, and sometimes they get exactly what they want. Briefly, anyway.

It sounds pretty tongue in cheek to say that the city drives visitors to psychological extremes, but this isn’t a snarky aside to history. Being in Jerusalem can actually make people lose their grip on reality. Jerusalem Syndrome—previously known as “Jerusalem fever”—has a long record, but was first recognized in an official capacity in 1930 as “a psychotic decompensation related to religious excitement induced by proximity to the holy places of Jerusalem.” A typical case saw a person with no history of mental illness becoming increasingly unbalanced in displays of religious fervor: obsessing over time spent alone in the city, fixating on cleanliness, shouting verses from sacred texts, preaching and fashioning “holy garb” for themselves out of whatever material was available. Once the person was removed from the city, though, they made a full recovery within a few weeks. (The emphasis on the spiritual differentiates this illness from Paris Syndrome, a similar urban sickness.)

That wasn’t the case with Nikolai Gogol. In fact, he didn’t fall under that type of Jerusalem Syndrome at all. But in 2000, the British Journal of Psychiatry broadened the scope of the illness to include experiences like his: “those who come with magical ideas of Jerusalem’s healing powers.”

In 1848 he came to the city in hopes of purifying his heart of an unnamed sin which he believed was crippling his ability to write. He’d always intended his acclaimed novel, Dead Souls, to be the first of a trilogy, an answer to Dante’s Inferno, but writing the second and third parts was proving to be a brutal struggle. A pilgrimage to the Holy City might convince God to lift the weight on his heart. “Until I’ve been to Jerusalem,” he wrote, “I’ll be incapable of saying anything comforting to anyone.”

In the end, though, the trip was a spiritual disaster. Gogol held vigil by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but it was far from the transcendent experience he longed for, and the night was far too short. “Before I had time to pull my wits together, it was over.” He didn’t find any relief there; the press of tourists and the barren, empty hills around the city genuinely crushed him. He returned to Russia a broken man, and spoke very little about his time in the Holy Land.

Once at home, still unable to finish any of his writing, he fell under the influence of the mystic Matvey Konstantinovsky, who insisted that the work itself was the reason for the author’s suffering. Finally, one cold February night, Gogol destroyed his manuscripts—including a draft of the sequel to Dead Souls—in a wild fervor, convinced of their inherent sinfulness. He took to his bed soon afterwards, and refused all food. Nine days later, he died of starvation.

In 1931, his remains were exhumed, and his body was discovered lying facedown in his coffin, which gave rise to legends that he was buried alive. No one knows if this is true, but I sincerely hope he wasn’t. The poor guy had enough to deal with.

(Image: Gogol Burning the Manuscript of the Second Part of “Dead Souls”. Repin. 1909.)

bendingsignpost:

zkarl:

Final touch

I love that this is reality.