30 Day Romanov Challenge: Day 9- Favourite photograph of Alexei
Nicholas II and Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich
There isn’t even a question when it comes to this one.
What really astounds me about this photograph is how royal Alexei looks. He and his father both wear casual clothing for their position, but manage to embody the Imperial name. Alexei looks as though he could rule an empire, defeat his illness, and maintain the loving family he grew up amongst. I get tears to my eyes just thinking about what a life was lost here, what good Alexei would have done for his country, had he been given the opportunity.
And he looks so proud of his position, not at all in an egotistical way, but like he knows what responsibility he has to his beloved Motherland.
And I think Nicholas knows this. He knows that his son could do well, against the odds, and bring a new future Russia. The love between father and son is so perfectly portrayed in this simple photograph.
(via deathto1965)
Ouroboros: a serpent biting its own tail. A mythological and alchemic symbol of the cyclic nature of the universe: creation out of destruction, life out of death. The ouroboros eats its own tail to sustain its life in an eternal cycle of renewal.
(Source: the-numinous-place, via tremblingcolors)
Antonín Slavíček (Czech, 1870–1910), At Home in Kameničky, 1904. Oil on canvas, 166 x 192 cm. National Gallery, Prague.
(via le-desir-de-lautre)
A kind of vacant hugeness, large awkward gianthood, characterises that Norse System; enormous force, as yet altogether untutored, stalking helpless with large uncertain strides. Consider only their primary mythos of the Creation. The Gods, having got the Giant Ymer slain, a Giant made by ‘warm wind,’ and much confused work, out of the conflict of Frost and Fire, determined on constructing a world with him. His blood made the Sea; his flesh was the Land, the Rocks his bones; of his eyebrows they formed Asgard their Gods’ dwelling; his skull was the great blue vault of Immensity, and the brains of it became the clouds. What a Hyper-Brobdingnagian business! Untamed Thought, great, giantlike, enormous; — to be tamed in due time into the compact greatness, not giantlike, but godlike and stronger than gianthood, of the Shakespeares, the Goethes! – Spiritually as well as bodily these men are our progenitors.
Thomas Carlyle -On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History - 1841 (via survivethejive)
