/lit/ - Literature

I like to believe I am a good natured person who is kind and compassionate and the reason I've grown progressively colder and distant over the years is because of people taking advantage of my nature.

But deep down I know the truth of it. I am an unpleasant person. I put forth an image of someone quiet and shy, helpful and harmless. But inside I am filled with hatred and disgust. I have never met another human being I could stand to be around. I see myself as superior to everyone around me. In my mind I am a martyr, God's chosen, someone special. A great destiny awaits me, I just haven't discovered it yet. I wish to rule over others and be seen as their saviour, but not through force or guile or hard work, I want to be raised up as if I descended from Heaven, as if it was my God given right. I have done nothing with my life and have neither the willpower nor interest in changing that fact. Which leaves me with only one choice. I wish to see it all burned down. Every human killed, every building toppled, everything returned to dust. But this too is beyond me. So I seek isolation. I just want to be left alone. One day I will have enough of even this and that will be that. I will die and nothing and no one will care or have been affected by me at any point whatsoever. My entire life will be a great nothing. My only regret is being born.

>>20614257
This type of thread has been posted every other day for many years now. Shit's more repetitive than some generals.

I'm looking for books that are like short little observations or essays. At most a few paragraphs long. To be clear though I don't want aphorisms and I don't want like 25 page long essays. Short enjoyable observation paragraphs is a good way to phrase it. They usually have those little stars after each observation is finished. Just hop in whenever you like read a few and then quit.

>>20455390
I can see how you would interpret it this way.

However, we have to consider:

>1) Sira really believes everything material, everything of this world is vanity, fleeting in the wind.
> 2) Therefore, any gift that God could bestow ( like a lot of kids, a powerful legacy, a strong son ), would in the end be fleeting.

Considering these things, the closing passage is less of a "But, hey, there's always the promise that Yaweh delivers" and more of a "There's nothing better to do, so just obey God's law".

Ben Sira genuinely does not believe that anything Yahweh could offer would make existence worthwhile. This can be gained from reading previous passages.

He does not believe in any hope. He just believes in better uses of time, which would be obeying God's law.

This is also reflected in these passages.

> Light is sweet,
> and it pleases the eyes to see the sun.
> However many years anyone may live,
> let them enjoy them all.
> But let them remember the days of darkness,
> for there will be many.
> Everything to come is meaningless.

and

> That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.
>I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him.

>>20457910
When you write "it" do you mean "True Detective"?

Yeah that show sucked. God damn, what a waste.

>>20457918
I answered this above, but it's essentially just saying "Sometimes the best answer in life is a shrug"

How do I learn rhetoric? Is it possible to learn what Cicero, Caesar and Seneca were so good at?

>>20065144
>I don't care about "intellectual" matters anymore and just want to be a pastoralist on the mountains who frequently meditates.
pretty cozy anon, as a tunisian i miss the precolonial era when the citizens of this hellhole i inhabit lived as tribes

Believing that one knows the definitive truth in anything, especially in philosophy and politics, is the mark of the psued.

>>17432653
medieval west;
>pre-socratics
>plato
>aristotle
>bible
>augustine
minimum prerequisites
>romances of arthur
>history of the kings of britain
>mabinogion
>canteburry tales
>the song of roland
>beowulf
>sir gawain
>nibelungenlied
more historical
>icelandic sagas
>heimskringla
>the decameron
>any book on the merovingians
modern fiction
name of the rose was amazing

How do we have art without the Folk?

>>16862675
>>16862772
>tfw have more potential than DeLillo and at a younger age

>>16845631
i did this a while back and got 2666 i finished it but I dont think the part about the crimes or fate where that good, at some point i will reread the part about the critics and the part about archimboldi though because it was great to learn about archimboldi's fascinating life after having the mystery set up in the first part in particular. After finishing this I rolled Cortazar's hopscotch (used the most recent chart I think) so ill read that before whatever I roll this time.

Books that will help me stop easily attracting 6s and start easily attracting 8s?

>>16418676
Stewardship is only anthropocentric as it creates a role for man rather than letting him just be a normal facet of the ecosystem. However, stewardship does not give man superiority over the rest of Creation. Stewardship relates to the biblical leaning that we take care of Creation because it's not ours (by definition stewardship refers to when peasants maintain a kings land while he is away), we are shackled to this responsibility. Biocentrism (from an ecology optic not pagan) fits the Christian mentality nicely, but because it ignores man's responsibility (and can't see that man is the end of biological evolution) modern ecologists end up losing out to reductionist materialists.
>>16418686
Also this. Without some degree of anthropocentrism, complete biocentrism falls back into us destroying the ecological status.
>>16418852
>>16419307
Bees are considered pretty holy creatures, most monasteries I know of have apiaries.

>>16348164
Did you understand Plato's 'Instance' which denies practically every critique which is aimed at early Plato after? For example, that Plato rooted the Forms in temporality rather than denied it.

That includes Nietzsche's.

>>16348164
Did you understand Plato's 'Instance'?

>>16304190
Be socially inept, so you can be spiritually ept.

>the Soul is the form of the body
But how does this make sense of everything having its respective form? Is Plato less certain than many claim he is with the exact nature of the theory? For example his rooting of being in the moment, or instance, seems to go against much of the typical conception of the forms.

>>16259141
>Only the love that springs from pity, and carries its compassion to the utmost breaking of self-will, is the redeeming Christian Love, in which Faith and Hope are both included of a—Faith as the unwavering consciousness of that moral meaning of the world, confirmed by the most divine exemplar; Hope as the blessed sense of the impossibility of any cheating of this consciousness.
>AFTER recognising the necessity of a regeneration of the human race, if we follow up the possibilities of its ennoblement we light on little else than obstacles.... We cannot withhold our acknowledgment that the human family consists of irremediably disparate races, whereof the noblest well might rule the more ignoble, yet never raise them to their level by commixture, but simply sink to theirs. Indeed this one relation might suffice to explain our fall; even its cheerlessness should not blind us to it: if it is reasonable to assume that the dissolution of our earthly globe is purely a question of time, we probably shall have to accustom ourselves to the idea of the human species dying out. On the other hand there is such a matter as life beyond all time and space, and the question whether the world has a moral meaning we here will try to answer by asking ourselves if we mean to go to ground as beasts or gods.

Of course, there is a more metaphysical prescience left out of these quotes, but they are not opposed to it but rather encourage that mentality.

Guys, we're not all pretty average intelligence are we?

>>16227249
And that paraphrased quote I provided, was in the context of the King asserting as it is seen in the play his power as determined by his power, obviously there is no "specific message" which Sophocles is trying to represent, such as "le break boundaries" like a shitty feminist poem, but these ideas are throughout the work, and some of them many of his works.

>>16163935
FREE WILL

>"God lets the oppositional will of the ground operate in order that might be which love unifies and subordinates itself to for the glorification of the Absolute. The will of love stands about the will of the ground and this predominance, this eternal decidedness, the love for itself as the essence of being in general, this decidedness is the innermost core of absolute freedom."
>"Philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poeticizing, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering [Untergang] for in the face of the god who is absent, we founder. Only a God Can Save Us."
>"For us contemporaries the greatness of what is to be thought is too great. Perhaps we might bring ourselves to build a narrow and not far reaching footpath as a passageway."
>"God has always been with me."
>“There is a thinking more rigorous than the conceptual”
>“...the most extreme sharpness and depth of thought belongs to genuine and great mysticism”
~Martin Heidegger

>Wisdom is one thing: to know the will that steers all things through all.
>This world-order, the same of all, no god nor man did create, but it ever was and is and will be: everlasting fire, kindling in measures and being quenched in measures.
>The invisible structure is greater than the visible.
~Heraclitus

>"And for these reasons, and out of such elements which are in number four, the body of the world was created, and it was harmonised by proportion, and therefore has the spirit of friendship; and having been reconciled to itself, it was indissoluble by the hand of any other than the framer."
~Plato

>“The Tao is beyond is and is not. How do I know this? I look inside myself and see.”
~Lao Tzu

>>16137565
Start with Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, some of the other medieval legends like Tristan und Isolde, then move on to the French and English legends.

But Parzival is the real esoteric core.

>>16123181
The simple charm and genius of their works, midwits like to imagine themselves beyond good things.

>>16065404
Read the introduction and skimmed the rest, sounds run of the mill. The author can't tell sincere ideas from memes/trolls and thinks boards run under one mind and ideology.
The problem with these articles/books is that they are always written by outsiders who are making a big deal out of one (admittedly ugly) part of 4chan. /pol/ isn't some big secret meeting place of le ebic alt-right warriors, its a failed containment board for the boomers and schizos and feds. The more obscure and more interesting communities of chan get overshadowed by their retarded brother. They need to delete the board or move it to its own address like they did with the_D so pseuds like the article author who think Peterson is a gateway to the alt-right can stop lumping us in with them.