/lit/ - Literature

>>23293344
>writers who embody true masculinity
Follow up on Melville's influences.

>>22090269
Carlyle's On the Nigger Question.

>>20293684
>I asked myself: What is this that, ever since earliest years, thou hast been fretting and fuming, and lamenting and self-tormenting, on account of? Say it in a word: is it not because thou art not HAPPY? Because the Thou (sweet gentleman) is not sufficiently honoured, nourished, soft-bedded, and lovingly cared for? Foolish soul! What Act of Legislature was there that thou shouldst be Happy? A little while ago thou hadst no right to be at all. What if thou wert born and predestined not to be Happy, but to be Unhappy! Art thou nothing other than a Vulture, then, that fliest through the Universe seeking after somewhat to eat; and shrieking dolefully because carrion enough is not given thee? Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.

>>19994987
Fair day's-wages for fair-day's-work! exclaims a sarcastic man; alas, in what corner of this Planet, since Adam first awoke on it, was that ever realised? The day's-wages of John Milton's day's-work, named Paradise Lost and Milton's Works, were Ten Pounds paid by instalments, and a rather close escape from death on the gallows. Consider that: it is no rhetorical flourish; it is an authentic, altogether quiet fact,—emblematic, quietly documentary of a whole world of such, ever since human history began. Oliver Cromwell quitted his farming; undertook a Hercules' Labour and lifelong wrestle with that Lernean Hydracoil, wide as England, hissing heaven-high through its thousand crowned, coroneted, shovel-hatted quackheads; and he did wrestle with it, the truest and terriblest wrestle I have heard of; and he wrestled it, and mowed and cut it down a good many stages, so that its hissing is ever since pitiful in comparison, and one can walk abroad in comparative peace from it;—and his wages, as I understand, were burial under the gallows-tree near Tyburn Turnpike, with his head on the gable of Westminster Hall, and two centuries now of mixed cursing and ridicule from all manner of men. His dust lies under the Edgeware Road, near Tyburn Turnpike, at this hour; and his memory is—Nay, what matters what his memory is? His memory, at bottom, is or yet shall be as that of a god: a terror and horror to all quacks and cowards and insincere persons; an everlasting encouragement, new memento, battleword, and pledge of victory to all the brave. It is the natural course and history of the Godlike, in every place, in every time. What god ever carried it with the Tenpound Franchisers; in Open Vestry, or with any Sanhedrim of considerable standing? When was a god found agreeable to everybody? The regular way is to hang, kill, crucify your gods, and execrate and trample them under your stupid hoofs for a century or two; till you discover that they are gods,—and then take to braying over them, still in a very long-eared manner!—So speaks the sarcastic man; in his wild way, very mournful truths.

>>18533165

Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.

>>18256552
>If you are in a strait, a very good indication as to choice—perhaps the best you could get—is a book you have a great curiosity about. You are then in the readiest and best of all possible conditions to improve by that book.

>>17940845
>'Rights I will permit thee to call everywhere "correctly-articulated mights." A dreadful business to articulate correctly!
- Chartism

>Divine right, take it on the great scale, is found to mean divine might withal!
- On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

>Carlyle always denied that he confused ‘‘might’’ with ‘‘right.’’ In the margins of a German biography of himself that he received in July 1866 he wrote, ‘‘What floods of nonsense have been and are spoken & thought (what they call thinking) about this poor maxim of Carlyle’s! C. had discovered for himself, not without a satisfaction of religious kind, that no man who is not in the right, were he even a Napoleon I at the head of armed Europe, has any real might whatever, but will at last be found mightless, and to have done, or settled as a fixity, nothing at all, except precisely so far as he was not in the wrong. Abolition and erosion awaits all ‘doings’ of his, except just what part of them was right’’ (Clubbe 98–99).

>If you are in a strait, a very good indication as to choice—perhaps the best you could get—is a book you have a great curiosity about. You are then in the readiest and best of all possible conditions to improve by that book.

>If you are in a strait, a very good indication as to choice—perhaps the best you could get—is a book you have a great curiosity about. You are then in the readiest and best of all possible conditions to improve by that book.

>>17221498
Spooks are quacks.

>When Nietzsche asks “Art thou genuine or art thou only an actor? Art thou a representative or the thing represented, itself?” (maxim 38) we are getting very close to Carlyle’s central preoccupation. Carlyle rarely used the term “actor”, but when he did it was in the same sense as Nietzsche, as when he castigates his implied reader, calling him “a cowardly play-actor in God’s universe” (“New Downing Street”, Latter-Day Pamphlets). This points up a concern Nietzsche and Carlyle shared. Rather than actor, Carlyle would usually talk about a “sham”, but it was his constant preoccupation to tell the actor/sham from the true that was central to the clothes metaphor in his early meisterwerk Sartor Resartus, and revisited often and at great length in his later career. Contemporary life, for Carlyle, was all sham; ruled by sham, and ruled by shams, that is, leaders, who “were not ruling at all; they had merely got the attributes and clothes of rulers” (“The Present Time”, Latter-Day Pamphlets). They were not the thing represented, but a sham in the clothes of the thing represented, and for both Nietzsche and Carlyle this disengagement from truth and instinct symptomatized a degenerate society, a society slavish rather than truly aristocratic, without real leaders, a society that said “no” to life. (Compare Carlyle’s “Everlasting Yea” in Sartor to Neitzsche’s “aristocratic affirmation” in Genealogy of Morals, I, 10.)

>>17169585
>To our less philosophical readers, for example, it is now clear that the so passionate Teufelsdrockh precipitated through "a shivered Universe" in this extraordinary way, has only one of three things which he can next do: Establish himself in Bedlam; begin writing Satanic Poetry; or blow out his brains.

>'Rights I will permit thee to call everywhere "correctly-articulated mights." A dreadful business to articulate correctly!
- Chartism

>Divine right, take it on the great scale, is found to mean divine might withal!
- On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

>To our less philosophical readers, for example, it is now clear that the so passionate Teufelsdrockh precipitated through "a shivered Universe" in this extraordinary way, has only one of three things which he can next do: Establish himself in Bedlam; begin writing Satanic Poetry; or blow out his brains.

>ctrl + f "Carlyle" >>16626409
Holy Fucking Based!!!

Why are /lit/anons unable to read Past and Present?

Was Carlyle mad?

What does /lit/ think of Carlyle?

>>15998139
>I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly preferring the Inferno to the two other parts of the Divine Commedia. Such preference belongs, I imagine, to our general Byronism of taste, and is like to be a transient feeling. The Purgatorio and Paradiso, especially the former, one would almost say, is even more excellent than it. It is a noble thing that Purgatorio, "Mountain of Purification;" an emblem of the noblest conception of that age. If sin is so fatal, and Hell is and must be so rigorous, awful, yet in Repentance too is man purified; Repentance is the grand Christian act. It is beautiful how Dante works it out. The tremolar dell' onde, that "trembling" of the ocean-waves, under the first pure gleam of morning, dawning afar on the wandering Two, is as the type of an altered mood. Hope has now dawned; never-dying Hope, if in company still with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of demons and reprobate is underfoot; a soft breathing of penitence mounts higher and higher, to the Throne of Mercy itself. "Pray for me," the denizens of that Mount of Pain all say to him. "Tell my Giovanna to pray for me," my daughter Giovanna; "I think her mother loves me no more!" They toil painfully up by that winding steep, "bent down like corbels of a building," some of them,—crushed together so "for the sin of pride;" yet nevertheless in years, in ages and aeons, they shall have reached the top, which is heaven's gate, and by Mercy shall have been admitted in. The joy too of all, when one has prevailed; the whole Mountain shakes with joy, and a psalm of praise rises, when one soul has perfected repentance and got its sin and misery left behind! I call all this a noble embodiment of a true noble thought.

- Carlyle

>>16000286
I've heard Longfellow is good.

>>15982014
>history books
Here is its prince.

>>14899137

Getting conflicting reports.

>>14814962
Fascism is really more Carlylian than Nietzschean.