October - 2020

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To Mankind, From Earth

Oct 29, 2020
2 min

To Mankind, From Earth

Eyes fluttering open, I woke up beside him with his face close to mine. I sighed. I’d given in to the argument yet again, crawling back and falling asleep in his awaiting arms. I silently got out of bed and drew back the curtains to look outside the window. Dusk. The sky’s dull indigo, diluted by the harsh lights of the street lamps. The horizon, polluted by the constant stream of smoke escaping the factories, the chimneys. I glanced behind me to see his vacant eyes staring a

My Grey, My Colours.

Oct 28, 2020
1 min

My Grey, My Colours.

This October the nights are long, my nights are drawn out. It must be soon until the sun brings with it my purpose. O, for when it cries, the sky and my sky become one, a harmony of total grey. It must be soon, where is my sun? It has no origin, this grey. Why do colours exaggerate this grey? There is a quelled sea within that washes over the back of my eyes, but never will you see. The grey suppresses this sea, keeps the blue out of sight. But never does the grey dare vanish

Reflections on navigating ‘womanhood’ in the 21st century

Ambiguous Freedoms

Oct 27, 2020
5 min

Ambiguous Freedoms

In my first year at Oxford, a fresh faced ingenue, I wrote an essay I believed to be revolutionary. A game changer. My controversial thesis was freedom is reduced in a democracy because we are forced to define our identity repeatedly due to the presentation of choices. I submitted it, the title ‘The Freedom to Live Ambiguously’ meriting its own title page. The tutor returned it. 43. A single comment — do people in Switzerland seem less free — served to eviscerate and burst my

Legacy

Oct 26, 2020
1 min

Legacy

We flee to the bedroom, the study, the café; hounded by foreseen fears. We don the writer’s robes and gaze pagewards, deep into ourselves: upon the mind’s fraught fields in their untamed splendour. A sea of grasses jostle and jeer, the oppressive mass of ever-growing anxieties, until we beat them back with a black ink scythe in hand. We tread on ink-soaked soil where once greenswards thrived, horrifying and natural. We stain page after page in perilous rhythms, pining for rel

Ha! We live!

Olivia Gurney-Randall

Oct 24, 2020
3 min

Ha! We live!

Never be ashamed of overthinking and over-feeling, it is a beautiful thing to feel. Sensitivity is precious, don’t lose it. Those who mock it misunderstand it and want it. Regret is the most horrid emotion one can feel and no matter how badly someone treats you, one must take a breath, step away and smile for what was. Things end, sometimes for the better. Flux is a commonality; it lurks but we make sense of chaos with our hearts and through each other. We have an endless we

The Lighthouse

Andrew Sullivan

Oct 23, 2020
5 min

The Lighthouse

If there was to be one quote that I hope is used to describe how I lived my life, it is "I don't know how many years on this earth I have left, but I'm gonna get real weird with it."(Devito, 2011) That's the kind of energy I hope to find in all forms of art. Whether it's a piece composed by Erik Satie or a poem by Lewis Caroll, I love to find something so strange that I can't really explain it. That not to say that I just look for weird stuff; it still has to say something. I

Art and I ; a complex relation.

Oct 23, 2020
2 min

Art and I ; a complex relation.

L'art, l'art, l'art. Que dire de l'art. C'est un monde, une vision, une vie, une philosophie, une passion, une souffrance, une prison, une liberté, une addiction, une addiction, une vérité, une illusion. On ne choisit pas l'art, l'art nous choisit. Elle est dans chaque chose, chaque mouvement, chaque battements. C'est une overdose de pensées, d'émotions, d'haine, de vice, d'idolâtre, d'adulation et d'ivresse. Elle m'hypnotise, m'emprisonne, m'envahit, me libère. Elle me montr

Signature

Oct 22, 2020
11 min

Signature

I always hated when she spoke to me like that; as if my sheer existence was invalid, my emotions unworthy. It was a type of knowing condescension, the quality of which I’ve only found in her anger. It wasn’t uncommon for me to give up, simply cave into the annoyance it’d be to continue down this line of conversation. It wasn’t uncommon for the wall of effort posed by the argument to be too high to climb. I had taken my share of flak in the past, and while it was generally pre

Lost for Words

Andrew Sullivan

Oct 20, 2020
2 min

Lost for Words

Something that has fascinated me when it comes to communication is when someone is at a loss for words. Those few short moments, whether because of the shock of a situation, lack of vocabulary, or just not really thinking of anything better to say, is interesting to think of. There are 171,146 words in the English language, and not a single one could sum up what has just been experienced. All those missed opportunities for hilarious jokes, heartwarming statements, or just som

To Build a Home

Olivia Gurney-Randall

Oct 6, 2020
4 min

To Build a Home

So often we try to tame life into boxes of clarity by coaxing it into a cage of linearity and despairing when it roars ragingly to the skies and shakes at the bars of our desire to control it. With steel hands we try to mould life, but the trickster, she escapes through closed fists like the gentle water of a stream flows through great conglomerate rock and defeats its strength with its mere fluidity. In all our attempts to regulate our souls, they spill out in our breaths, o

Letter 1

Olivia Gurney-Randall

Oct 5, 2020
4 min

Letter 1

Dear Reader, As a child I observed my civilised teachers flutter around the classroom, and I watched politicians diplomatically meandering their way out of blame on the TV. I watched the grey sea of suit-wearing professionals sitting glumly on the tube ready to take on the ferocious world of London with its media and its banking and its bars. In other words, I watched civility, maturity and responsibility and I linked them to adulthood. However, I also grew up watching my pa