Member: themista

CollectionsYour library (181)

ReviewsNone

TagsEnglish (26), Fiction (14), Philosophy (14), French (13), Poetry (10), Essays (9), Beat Generation (6), Critical (5), Aesthetics (5), American (5) — see all tags

Cloudstag cloud, author cloud

GroupsAwful Lit., French Connection, Japanese Culture, Rare, Old or Offbeat, Tea!, The Chapel of the Abyss

Favorite authorsGaston Bachelard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jack Kerouac, John Cowper Powys, Marcel Proust, William Shakespeare, Henry David Thoreau, Oscar Wilde (Shared favorites)

About meI am a single woman living in Illinois. I am fortunate to live in a quiet semi-rural area where I can turn to the beauties of the natural world for spiritual sustenance and inspiration. I try to base my existence on ideas of slowness, contemplation, inner luxury, and poetic perception. I have a particular fondness for fin-de-siècle artists and writers, and I am always trying to learn from their aesthetic insights. I am also an admirer of Gaston Bachelard and value his work on creative imagination and poetic reverie. I have several ridiculously arcane ambitions, including cultivating chyrsanthemums in the best tradition of a Chinese sage, memorizing as many of Les Fleurs du Mal as I can manage (4 down, 160 to go), and practicing an authentic Epicurean lifestyle (the original Themista was one of the most prominent followers of Epicurus, and she authored a book entitled the Vanity of Glory). I spend my leisure time crafting jewelry, listening to blues, pondering the mystery of the Tao, reading obscure and recondite books, and chasing chimeras. And I like to drink tea.

"One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead."--Oscar Wilde

About my libraryI enjoy studying Elizabethan drama, Romantic poetry, Stoic and Epicurean philosophy, and fin-de-siecle artists and writers. My library collection is mostly
electronic these days, thanks to the following sites:

ABU: La Bibliothèque Universelle
Athena
Bartleby
Celebration of Women Writers
Ebooks Libres & Gratuits
Electronic Text Center (U of VA)
Gallica
Google Book Search
In Parentheses (York U)
Internet Archive
IntraText Digital Library
Liber Liber
Making of America
Manybooks
Munseys
Online Books Page (U of Penn)
Project Gutenberg - Australia
Project Gutenberg - Canada
Project Gutenberg - Europe
Project Gutenberg - US
Project Gutenberg Consortia Center
Project Runeberg
Universal Library (Carnegie Mellon U)
University of Adelaide Library
Wikipedia List of Digital Library Projects
WOWIO
World Public Library

Homepagehttp://www.themista.com

LocationIllinois

Account typepublic, free

Connection NewsConnection News

URLs http://www.librarything.com/profile/themista (profile)
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/themista (library)

Common KnowledgeSeries (10), Awards (57), Characters (840), Places (104)

Member sinceNov 20, 2007