/lit/ - Literature

Orwell is not the supreme mediocrity. Some of his essays have merit.1984 and Animal Farm have political insight.
His Politics and the English Language is plain right.
He was not a poet. From a poetic perspective he is indeed very mediocre.

P.S. there is nothing wrong with didactic writing. And Will Self can't write for shit. Orwell's prose is better than Self's.

Gorgias:

>There is no truth.
>Even if there was truth, you couldn't know it.
>Even if you could know it, you couldn't communicate it.

>>5374670
Yeah. "Truth and Lies in the Nonmoral Sense".

>In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history"—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/modules/Philosophers/Nietzsche/Truth_and_Lie_in_an_Extra-Moral_Sense.htm

Nietzsche at his most clear.

>>5374352
> After you've read all of those works you will have come that much closer to knowing something. But you still won't.

Why instead of telling us what you've read, don't you tell us what you know? What have you learned from reading the above works?

Postmodernism has been defined as "incredulity towards meta-narratives". Meta-narrative is just a fancy name for history. It's incredulity towards history, because history requires a metaphysical interpretation as discussed above, and so history has suffered the same incredulity as all questions of God have. How you view history will tell you who your god is. If you look at the Americanist view of history it is clear that Lady Liberty is the god of the Americans, for example. So the question about history or meta-narratives is identical to the question about God, and the so-called death of God is also the death of meta-narratives or history. It's really the death of Truth, all knowledge, and the embracing of a severe skepticism, a Pyrrhonism.
What I'm saying doesn't just apply to History. It really does apply to all forms of study, as I suggested earlier. All disputes must eventually be reduced to First Principles, as Plato suggested. Questions like "what is truth?", "what is man?", "what is the first cause?", determine all of how history, politics, science, music, poetry - everything. So I'm not going to argue what I think the true conception of history is. People that have read some of my posts can gather. Point is: Plato is based, reduce things to First Principles.

P.S. philosophy is cool and science is gay.

It isn't surprising that in order to understand history you must understand God, because, as we learn from Plato, Truth is One, so all truths in particular ultimately lead to the general Truth. Every historian must first and foremost be a metaphysician/theologian (just as every thinker in every field must start with metaphysics/theologian), and if they are not a metaphysician they will inevitably write vulgar Soap Opera history; they might talk about disputes between this king and that king, rivalries and jealousies between nations, the disputes between lord and peasant; but they will never get to the point of asking, what is the cause of all these events? Is it a part of God's "Providence"? Is it part of the Hindu cycle of creation and destruction? Is it the history of "survival of the fittest" or some other material mechanism according to a naturalist metaphysics which would say that men are governed by "laws of nature"? Is it an Hegelian dialectic between opposing cultures being synthesized into what will one day be the ultimate State and the end of history? Is it a Marxist materialist dialectic as the history of "class struggles"? An Americanist history of the war between the Forces of Tyranny and the Forces of Liberty? This is the real question about history; Soap Opera history is babble in the mouth of a gossip.

History is the study of past causes and their effects. If it is a matter of the cause of human deeds and their effects, we speak of human history. If is a matter of the cause of rock formations and their effects, we speak of geological history. If about the motions and interactions of astronomical history, we speak of astronomical history. All of these histories are united in that they share the same First Cause, which must be the cause of them all. This is why the correct understanding of history is dependent upon the correct understanding of the First Cause, which is the study of metaphysics or theology. To put it differently, in order to have the correct view history you must have the correct view of God. If you interpret the First Cause, as many do today, as something physical event that just happened ("the Big Bang banged itself into existence"), that will determine how you understand all other histories, including human history (you will view human history as a series of aimless physical causes that "just happen", just as you do the First Cause); if you adopt a Deist view and say that the First Cause is some kind of Deity that gave the world physical laws and then left it alone, then you will interpret human history as the history of matter moving and colliding according to those laws (a common view today); if you adopt a Hindu view of the First Cause you will interpret human history as great cycles of creation and destruction happening over and over again over eons and eons; if you adopt a Christian view you will interpret human history as the history of man's rebellion against and subsequent reconciliation with God; and so on. How you understand the First Cause will determine how you understand all subsequent causes and effects, down to the little details of your "daily life".

If you read the poetry of all eras it means that you will never embrace a single ethos. You will forever have the modern ethos of multiethos, multiculturalism, Ezra Pound translating everything. You ought to read the poetry that reflects your beliefs (but first of all you should concern yourself with forming correct beliefs). If you read all poetry it means that you don't have any beliefs; your T. S. Eliot's emasculated passive observer who stares at everything and partakes of nothing. Nietzsche's "last man".
That's the thing. You read the whole "Western Canon" and think that you are learning something. But you aren't. You are just reinforcing your belief in "Western Civilization" or "Human History" or "Different Cultures" or whatever it is that is compelling you to read everything from Homer to Tao Lin. Ah, it's a horrible problem. This is just a symptom of being born in a liberal society that tells you that beliefs, values, aesthetics, etc., don't matter as long as you share the same belief in a vague idea of liberty.
Why read all things? So you can become a priest of liberalism and proclaim the equality of all cultures I suppose (when the liberal proclaims the equality of all cultures he is really proclaiming the supremacy of the cult of liberty/liberalism).

I guess what I mean to say is that more important than what you read is how you read it, sort of your own meta-text. For example, if you are a Muslim, you will interpret everything you read Islam in everything you read. Same for a Modernist/Liberal, and whoever. Look at this way. The way that we read Homer today is a lot different to the way it was read in Ancient Greece; almost to the point that we are hearing different Homer's. In Greece Homer was something of a sage; hearing his verse was part of coming of age. Today Homer is either something to "appreciate" in that smug art appreciation way, something of historical interest, etc. I imagine that there are a few young soldiers in the world here and there that read Homer for battle morale or something, and perhaps they're the closest to the original reading. Point is, how you read is more important than what you read. If you read the entire Western Canon in that art appreciation manner I mentioned then what are you going to gain but the excessive love of the smell of your own farts?

>>5373064
Look at T. S. Eliot for example. The best modern of poets, and his poetry from beginning to the end is the poetry of emasculated despair. Emphasis on emasculated. His poetry is not worth reading except to scowl at and throw away in disgust, although scholars will insist that it's worth reading so that you can know the "spirit of the times" (but what the scholars don't know is that the spirit of past times is not that important).

The danger of having an encyclopedic knowledge of literature is that you will become a pedantic know-it-all but you can be a pedantic know-it-all without reading anything; look at me. The potential fruits are fairly little. I can't imagine what you can gain by reading widely as opposed to selectively. Some will say that you will have a better acquaintance with the whole of human experience; but, A. books are always experience at second-hand, B. why not choose the best experiences rather than them all? I mean, why experience something that will make you weaker, more anxious, more hateful, etc., like many of the best-written (in terms of literary flourish) modern books do?
People that think that having read widely is the same as being wise just need to spend 10 minutes listening to an Academician talk. I tell you that there are people that have never read a single book in their lives that are more wise than what you will find in the Academy.

It's better to pick 5 good books and stick to them for the rest of your life.

Generally modern books are not worth reading. The best of modern books are finely sculpted pieces of shit.

>>5371329
Probably the flood wrecking the atmosphere. But there's a passage in Genesis 6 where God states that the days of man's life will be 120 years; so maybe he just weakened the body so that it would age faster.

>>5371284
Check it. Adam lived for 930 years. By the time he had died he was a great great great great great great grandfather.

>>5368855
>The story in Genesis is drawn almost completely from the early Canaanite religion.

Then why no mention of Moloch or other deities?
What you said doesn't make sense at all. In Genesis the man called Canaan is vilified/humiliated and his descendants are made out to be wicked. If Genesis is the product of Canaanite religion you would expect Canaan to be glorified.

Adam and Eve lived for hundreds of years.

I will ask you something. What is the dialectic?

Hegel is the greatest of sophists.

>>5367366
cheap trick

Great Hector first amidst both armies broke
The solemn silence, and their powers bespoke:

"Hear, all ye Trojan, all ye Grecian bands,
What my soul prompts, and what some god commands.
Great Jove, averse our warfare to compose,
O'erwhelms the nations with new toils and woes;
War with a fiercer tide once more returns,
Till Ilion falls, or till yon navy burns.
You then, O princes of the Greeks! appear;
'Tis Hector speaks, and calls the gods to hear:
From all your troops select the boldest knight,
And him, the boldest, Hector dares to fight.
Here if I fall, by chance of battle slain,
Be his my spoil, and his these arms remain;
But let my body, to my friends return'd,
By Trojan hands and Trojan flames be burn'd.
And if Apollo, in whose aid I trust,
Shall stretch your daring champion in the dust;
If mine the glory to despoil the foe;
On Phoebus' temple I'll his arms bestow:
The breathless carcase to your navy sent,
Greece on the shore shall raise a monument;
Which when some future mariner surveys,
Wash'd by broad Hellespont's resounding seas,
Thus shall he say, 'A valiant Greek lies there,
By Hector slain, the mighty man of war,'
The stone shall tell your vanquish'd hero's name.
And distant ages learn the victor's fame."

This fierce defiance Greece astonish'd heard,
Blush'd to refuse, and to accept it fear'd.

>>5367357
>the gatsby quote is nice and evocative and glittering

it's faggoty, I mean, it's mawkish, I mean, it's cheesy.

Why does Fitzgerald criticize "flabby impressionability" in the first chapter of that book when sentences like, "In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars", are exactly that?

>Is it true that everything is subjective?

No. If it were true that everything is subjective, then the statement that everything is subjective would be subjective. Plato refuted this sophism thousands of years ago.

>>5338278
>wise philosopher correctly points out that science is wrong
>somehow the scientist mistakes this for an ad hominem

typical scientist

You say, "Jane Austen is 18th century Sex & the City."

And in general you draw comparisons between the books you are attacking and trash TV shows and films.

>>5362938
>the author goes from the position of an all powerful God controlling the direction and all inferences of a work

Never in the history of man has anyone thought that the author of a work has this power, unless they thought that God Himself was the author.

>>5362560
Which is to say that all places are equally far from and close to down, just as all numbers are equally green and equally red.