/lit/ - Literature

>>10248939
>the /pol/ infographics.

After the recent shooting in Las Vegas I want to know what the /lit/ brain trust has to say about mass shooters - particularly why seemingly meaningless acts of violence are on the rise in the US. Is it the dissolution of the social contract? The beginning of Hegel's end of history and the experiment of modernity?

One possible theory I saw a while back was written about here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/thresholds-of-violence . Not super well-written or supported but it might get you thinking.

One question I have in particular is if this is a result of people being less apprehensive to commit random acts of violence or an increase in the desire to do so?

I feel like being praised as an exceptional genius from a young age has hurt me more than anything else. It's like I've consciously and subconsciously (maybe unconsciously?) based my entire identity around how smart I am, and as I've gotten older it has only become glaringly obvious to me that other things are a lot more valuable than just intelligence.

Not sure if it's just a thing with Asperger's, but it really fucks me up knowing that I read all of these books and poetry and have to search hard to find their beauty, but to others it comes so easily. It honestly might be one of the saddest things in my life.

>>9097271
>Kant
>Schopenhauer
>Nietzsche
>memes
???

Also I think that people should dedicate themselves to what they're interested in - if you truly want to be an intellectual then you should have a passion for knowledge. The idea that you're either a humanities or a stem person is pretty ridiculous and anyone who subscribes to that ideology is severely limiting themselves in the pursuit of knowledge or intellectualism.

I majored in EECS because it's something I enjoy, and then I stayed to finish up minors in philosophy and math at UC Berkeley - I would have minored in literature as well if I was able to. If you claim to be extremely intelligent but can't grasp both the fields of science and the humanities then you really aren't intelligent - obviously this applies more today than in the past because the spread and acquisition of knowledge has become incredibly easy in comparison to how it once was.

>>8455172
I got my IB diploma at a a school in the US, so yrmv.
I read:
Samuel Beckett's Trilogy
Ulysses
The Republic
The Making of Americans
Ovid's Metamorphoses
Absalom, Absalom!
The Sound and the Fury
The Waves
Paradise Lost
The Recognitions
The Tale of Genji (first book I ever read in high school)
Nausea
The Count of Monte Cristo (alongside Catch-22, my least favorite book)
Walden

And then we read these plays:
Peer Gynt
Hamlet
Othello
Blood Wedding
Our Town
A Streetcar Named Desire
Death of a Salesman (personal favorite alongside Peer Gynt)
A Doll's House
King Lear
The Tempest

There are some I'm forgetting for sure, but this is the gist of it.

I genuinely do not undertand how people with no artistic sensibility can withstand the gut-punches modern life throws at us at a daily basis. If it weren't for art, or creation in general, I would have ended myself.

Would you have ? I was reading Rilke recently, and he gave the following advice to Kappus : that if Kappus could not live without poetry (which means, killing himself if he couldn't write), then he truly was a poet. What do you think about this ?