/lit/ - Literature

>>13244998

>Why were most intellectuals and good authors left-leaning?

Quality over quantity anon. We'll always have William "Burn Othello get asphyxiated by pillow" Shakespeare, Voltaire, the Classical authors, Goethe, and Schopenhauer.

>>12850204
Ignore the haters, OP. I think about this often, and feel exactly as you do. To know that Shakespeare was not merely a painting, a fairy-tale figure who from his otherworldly dwelling happened to write stories of his own, but a real flesh-and-blood person like you or me, who was born in the house attached, is something I still cannot fathom.

I blame photography being invented so late - when all we've ever seen of these ancient figures are statues and illustrations, it's natural for them to seem more like literary characters themselves than people like us. A single picture of Plato would shatter this conception completely. And I have personally spent a lot of time visualizing what exactly Plato and Aristotle and Shakespeare would've looked like as real people, such as imagining a photograph of Plato's Academy, with all the students standing next to eachother, and Plato in front of them, and Aristotle somewhere beside him, all facing the camera. It's indeed trippy, to realize these people were identical to ourselves. At least the future won't have such problems, they'll see every famous figure through photographs and videographs in a way that most people of history have not had the luxury thus far.