/lit/ - Literature

>>12374098
>dark night of the soul
St John's "dark night" is not really spiritual dryness, it's more where a spiritual person has progressed so much in detachment that their faith is the only 'attachment' they have left. It's not something beginners really experience. I don't know how the phrase "dark night of the soul" has entered common parlance with the complete opposite meaning of what it really means.

>>12374073
I think of faith as an act of the will. I choose to follow Christ even though I obviously don't have certainty that he exists. The only advice I'd have for you is talk to a priest. If you don't feel up to that though, The Imitation of Christ might help you. It's a long road though. It took me nearly two years of practicing before I finally began to understand what faith exactly is. Christ may be taking you the long way round. He certainly did with me.

Mouchette by Georges Bernanos

The only real rest she had ever found, amongst so many people whom she hated or scorned, was in a feeling of disgust. She was incapable of any rational justification of her revolt and her barely-conscious refusal of the life around her, and took her revenge for her incomprehensible solitude in her own way. If she was tired, she would consciously lie down in the dirtiest place at the roadside.

>>12284485
based bresson poster

>>12107910
Carmelite-Platonist Catholicism / Red Toryism

>>11777120
>What can I read to fix this?
Seneca's letters and then try to find a vocation. Also don't think that faith is a retreat (see pic related). I went through a similar intellectual reconstitution as you seem to have last year and only through anti-depressants and the church community at my college was I able to put myself back together.

>>11711397
>Was she a masochist?
Pretty much. She was a pathologically lonely person who was incapable of feeling at peace without constantly chastising herself, often quite painfully. She was the sort of person that understood (correctly, I think) that life is a task, not a possession, and that you can only truly love yourself for the sake of others, never for your own sake. But I think as her life went on this self-destructive tendency intensified to the point where she couldn't reconcile justice with being kind to herself. At this point in her life, she started praying to God to kill her and turn her into food for the poor. As disturbing as that might be, I find her very relatable, as I think many lonely people do. Her ethics and her mystic theology have had a pretty decisive influence on my own faith, as well as revealing the harmful direction of that same self-destructive tendency that I can see in myself.

>>6018180
>Almost no one is like Bresson.
Is it because he's a genius, or because no one tried to do like him ?
>He was the greatest director French cinema ever had.
Undeniably.

Also, if you know any good book on german expressionism....