/lit/ - Literature

>"The beetle form serves to sear this truth home. He alters his voice as part of becoming a beetle, but Gregor’s voice was gone in the truest sense already. They simply talk past him, nagging, ratcheting up the demands upon him. People-pleasing had broken him, severed his tie to his true self."

>"Gregor’s (and perhaps Franz Kafka’s) role in the family had likely been managing everyone else’s reactions and emotions and finding himself the lynchpin of everyone’s wellbeing. We can see that in each family member’s frantic reactions to his transformation. When a person is valued only as a means to an end, it removes a layer of their humanity. Kafka takes that degradation to the physical level to highlight what was already present in the family."

>reading about an author who lived in poverty
>"wow, so relatable"
>realise that it was usually voluntarily and they could have just found a steady job and bought a house after saving a couple of years

Do you think the current economic situation will seriously hinder the literary output of aspiring authors?

Cormac McCarthy for example lived in poverty, and couldn't pay child support or even sometimes pay rent, but it's clear that if he wanted to he probably could have just found a cozy job and lived a middle-class life quite easily. I'm not criticising him, it's just things seem so much more desperate now.

>"It seems so dreadful to stay a bachelor, to become an old man struggling to keep one's dignity while begging for an invitation whenever one wants to spend an evening in company, to lie ill gazing for weeks into an empty room from the corner where one's bed is, always having to say good night at the front door, never to run up a stairway beside one's wife, to have only side doors in one's room leading into other people's living rooms, having to carry one's supper home in one's hand, having to admire other people's children and not even being allowed to go on saying: 'I have none myself,' modeling oneself in appearance and behavior on one or two bachelors remembered from one's youth. That's how it will be, except that in reality, both today and later, one will stand there with a palpable body and a real head, a real forehead, that is, for smiting on with one's hand."