/lit/ - Literature

Anybody know good books that talk about historical jesters. I find them fascinating, they had to be very intelligent and incredibily socially skilled if they were to live long.
If there are books on specific persons, all the better.

>>19303684
The world is filled with a lot of people who think they’re the center of the world, and it’s also filled with a lot of books and a lot of writers, far too many for everyone to have all the knowledge of about. Talking about literature and philosophy (including in an academic setting specifically) highlights rather glaringly, at some point, that you are just one person amongst hundreds of millions of others talking about it and unlikely to be the greatest expert in the field, unlikely to get the fame you want, and also unlikely to get all the devotion and dedication you want to your own unique ideas. The Professor, the teacher, the poster on /lit/, compassionate, nice, and patient as they may be, almost always is forced to view you as just one amongst the thousands and thousands of students or conversationalists they interact with. You’re being processed by them and sometimes rather coldly, smugly judged and analyzed by them in ways which seem arbitrary to you, because they have so much experience with you and your kind that there’s little sentimentality in them about all this anymore.

The mindset of performing for others, wanting to be the best, get the awards, the pat on the head, get all the responses to you — leads to an inevitable feeling of emptiness, because it’s dependent on praise from, validation from, and attention from others. The greatest rewards in literature and philosophy are self-directed, about your own inner moments of joy, whether it’s in reading something you genuinely enjoy or writing something you can genuinely be proud of and enjoyed writing.

I used to browse /lit/ rather obsessively and also read a lot of the dense doorstoppers so worshiped on here as a sort of exhibition of one’s intelligence and stamina to be able to read through and talk about them. I’ve read and enjoyed these works, even while forcing myself to work through the difficult parts of them, and remember using to love the fact that if I put enough effort into posts and threads, I could reliably get people saying, “Nice work and effort-posting, this is a rare type of post on /lit/ I haven’t seen in a long time.”

But it doesn’t really matter in the end. Life went on, I became disillusioned to the fact that there’s no jobs in academia, and my attention span and desire to perform for others sadly shriveled away. I stick to light casual reading now and even science-fiction books for fun (the same genre fiction I used to see myself as so superior to), and my style of writing has become a lot simpler and less eloquent because I no longer read so many dense, eloquent works as a sort of test of my literary stamina and prowess. There’s a touch of sadness in the fact that I no longer get the same joy I got out of arguing and discussing with others, and sometimes coming out the victor, as well as of performing for professors and getting the, “This is rather exquisite work,” but that’s how life is.