/lit/ - Literature

>come to /lit/
>still a bunch of pseuds
Nice board you have here fags

>>18652316
The cacodemon isn't really scary. They're moreso mischevious trolls who come out of nowhere with their attacks. Perhaps like a zen master is what you're looking for? Kodo Sawaki?

>Surely,

>>17676753
>his mind is nothing but the bowels of his heart

My favourite part
>The left side of my brain had been shut down like a damaged section of a spinship being sealed off, airtight doors leaving the doomed compartments open to vacuum. I could still think. Control of the right side of my body soon returned. Only the language centers had been damaged beyond simple repair. The marvelous organic computer wedged in my skull had dumped its language content like a flawed program. The right hemisphere was not without some language - but only the most emotionally charged units of communication could lodge in that affective hemisphere; my vocabulary was now down to nine words. (This, I learned later, was exceptional, many victims of CVAs retain only two or three.) For the record, here is my entire vocabulary of manageable words: fuck, shit, piss, cunt, goddamn, motherfucker, asshole, peepee, and poopoo.
>A quick analysis will show some redundancy here. I had at my disposal eight nouns, which stood for six things; five of the eight nouns could double as verbs. I retained one indisputable noun and a single adjective which also could be used as a verb or expletive. My new language universe was comprised of four monosyllables, three compound words, and two baby-talk repetitions.
>My arena of literal expression offered four avenues to the topic of elimination, two references to human anatomy, one request for divine imprecation, one standard description of or request for coitus, and a coital variation which was no longer an option for me since my mother was deceased.
>All in all, it was enough.
>I will not say that I remember my three years in the mud pits and slime slums of Heaven's Gate with fondness, but it is true that these years were at least as formative as - and probably more so than - my previous two decades on Old Earth.
>I soon found that among my intimate acquaintances - Old Sludge, the scoop-shovel foreman; Unk, the slum-yard bully to whom I paid my protection bribes; Kiti, the lice-ridden crib doxy whom I slept with when I could afford it - my vocabulary served me well. 'Shit-fuck,' I would grunt, gesticulating. >'Asshole cunt peepee fuck."
>'Ah,' grinned Old Sludge, showing his one tooth, 'going to the company store to get some algae chewies, huh?"
>'Goddamn poopoo,' I would grin back at him.

People often fault Simmons for fellating old literature too much, Keats in particular, forgetting that he made a braindamaged satyr the most significant writer of the far future.

>>12399151
>Christianity philosophy
aka 1001 awesome mental exercises to justify your belief in a sky wizard

>No one has ever put forth a praiseworthy incentive for reproduction. None are needed. People do what they do, including the deed of procreation, because of overpowering pressures - fears, infatuations, and so on - that come from within them and from outside them. All social orders command their members to imbibe in pipe dreams of posterity, the mirage of immortality, to keep them ahead of the extinction that would ensue in a few generations if the species did not replenish itself. This is the implicit, and most pestiferous, rationale for propagation: to become fully integrated into a society, one must offer it fresh blood. Naturally, the average set of parents does not conceive of their conception as a sacrificial act. These are civilized human beings we are talking about, and thus they are quite able to fill their heads with a panoply of less barbaric rationales for reproduction, among them being the consolidation of a spousal relationship; the expectation of new and enjoyable experiences in the parental role; the hope that one will pass the test as a mother or father; the pleasing of one’s own parents, not to forget their parents and possibly a great-grandparent still loitering about; the serenity of taking one’s place in the seemingly deathless lineage of a familial enterprise; the creation of individuals who will care for their paternal and maternal selves in their dotage; the quelling of a sense of guilt or selfishness for not having done their duty as human beings; and the squelching of that faint pathos that is associated with the childless. Such are some of the overpowering pressures upon those who would fertilize the future. These pressures build up in people throughout their lifetimes and must be released, just as everyone must evacuate their bowels or fall victim to a fecal impaction. And who, if they could help it, would suffer a building, painful fecal impaction? So we make bowel movements to relieve this pressure. Quite a few people make gardens because they cannot stand the pressure of not making a garden. Others commit murder because they cannot stand the pressure building up to kill someone, either a person known to them or a total stranger. Everything is like that. Our whole lives consist of metaphorical as well as actual bowel movements, one after the other. Releasing these pressures can have greater or lesser consequences in the scheme of our lives. But they are all pressures, all bowel movements of some kind. At a certain age, children are praised for making a bowel movement in the approved manner. Later on, the praise of others dies down for this achievement and our bowel movements become our own business, although we may continue to praise ourselves for them. But overpowering pressures go on governing our lives, and the release of these essentially bowel-movement pressures may once again come up for praise, congratulations, and huzzahs of all kinds.