/lit/ - Literature

>>14027332
I think you ought to think more clearly about why you feel like you have to interact like this.

I think you ought to think more clearly on if it helps you at all in learning anything, or moving you towards the truth.

I think you ought to think more clearly on if it makes you happier.

I wonder what makes you feel like you have to interact with the posters in the thread in this matter, and I wonder if you interact in the real world like this.

Do you, anon?

>>13847934
Based.

>>13828978
You need to understand what a canon is: a canon is a tradition aimed at delineating "the essential books", to get around the problem that none of us have the time to read everything. (And the type of reading I am talking about here is essentially 'study': it is reading a book three times or more and trying to completely understand it, as well as reading it (if possible) in its original language)

It does not make sense to talk of "The Canon" because people have different reasons to read books: there is a canon for philosophy, for poetry, for history, for scripture (the Bible itself is a canon).

In a sense we each must decide, somewhat arbitrarily, what we will have as our own canon: what books we will attend to and what books we will not. We can get some guidance in this choice by looking at what books were judged as great in the past, but ultimately what you choose to read is an existential choice, because in choosing to read this book you are closing off thousands on thousands of other books which you might have read instead, and you only have a limited number of books you can read before you die.

For me, Plato and Shakespeare are in my Canon, because I have a pretty good guess that, having lasted this long, they must have something good to tell us. I generally also think that you ought to lean more towards classics when making your own Canon, because in reading classics you can gain a better understanding of what authors throughout the history of the west were responding to: you can easily understand Plato without Aristotle, and you can easily understand Aristotle without Aquinas, but it is not clear that the opposite is true in either case, and thus it seems wise to start as far back as possible when choosing what books you should study and digest.