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![In the late 1880s, the body of a 16-year-old girl was pulled from the Seine. She was apparently a suicide, as her body showed no marks of violence, but her beauty and her enigmatic smile led a Paris pathologist to order a plaster death mask of her face.
In the romantic atmosphere of fin de siècle Europe the girl’s face became an ideal of feminine beauty. The protagonist of Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1910 novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge writes, “The mouleur, whose shop I pass every day, has hung two plaster masks beside his door. [One is] the face of the young drowned woman, which they took a cast of in the morgue, because it was beautiful, because it smiled, because it smiled so deceptively, as if it knew.”
Ironically, in 1958 the anonymous girl’s features were used to model the first-aid mannequin Rescue Annie, on which thousands of students have practiced CPR. Though the girl’s identity remains a mystery, her face, it’s said, has become “the most kissed face of all time.”](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llts0s7ery1qzzlkao1_250.jpg)
In the late 1880s, the body of a 16-year-old girl was pulled from the Seine. She was apparently a suicide, as her body showed no marks of violence, but her beauty and her enigmatic smile led a Paris pathologist to order a plaster death mask of her face.
In the romantic atmosphere of fin de siècle Europe the girl’s face became an ideal of feminine beauty. The protagonist of Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1910 novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge writes, “The mouleur, whose shop I pass every day, has hung two plaster masks beside his door. [One is] the face of the young drowned woman, which they took a cast of in the morgue, because it was beautiful, because it smiled, because it smiled so deceptively, as if it knew.”
Ironically, in 1958 the anonymous girl’s features were used to model the first-aid mannequin Rescue Annie, on which thousands of students have practiced CPR. Though the girl’s identity remains a mystery, her face, it’s said, has become “the most kissed face of all time.”
(via pleasekeepmeinmind)
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NaNoWriMo
I’ve gone from not being able to get a page of journaling done to signing up for National Novel Writing Month. The goal? To go from zero to fifty thousand. This should cement my status as a card carrying masochist.
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Nostalgia is denial — denial of the painful present. The name for this denial is golden age thinking — the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one ones living in. It’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.
Midnight in Paris (via 52hearts)
(Source: imdb.com, via theotherway)
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What’s the point in a faithful reproduction? Or reproduction at all?
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Champagne Wishes
It’s easy to romanticize summer. The languid heat and the bare feet. The time for long phone conversations about the person you want to be with the person you want to be with. Impromptu trips to the beach with a cute french boy. Late night shows that leave you stranded on the hot city sidewalks. But most of all the possibilites.
It was atop Printemps, this picture. I couldn’t afford anything but a flute of champagne. It’s easy to romanticize summer. Too easy.
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”Portrait of a lady” - Tim Walker for Vogue UK (November 2005)
(via ghostparties)
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(via thingssheloves)
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(Source: ghostparties)
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“If there is no love in the world we will make a new world, and give it heavy walls.”
