/lit/ - Literature

>“Have you heard the story of Judas Iscariot?” asks Bucksneed.
>I nod.
>Bucksneed muses: “Iscariot was a car salesman from Issaquah, or perhaps a technologist. You know the kind. Smile empty of all but its too-white teeth. Fantastic dentistry! it must be said. Eyes uncreased by genuinity. What I mean to say, Stan, is that Iscariot and his people were inured to falsity. It was the standard to which everything was measured. It provided the counterweight, opposite the fulcrum, to all that could be shoehorned into the weighting cup: grain, parenthood, labor, land; all measured out to its immaculate precision. Iscariot never quite gathered the nerve to sit down upon it himself.
>“It would be easy, here, to delve too deeply into the mundane. Yes, it is a fact that Iscariot was obsessed with value. All was subservient to the strictly material. But all is subservient to the strictly material—is it not?—so this is hardly out of sorts. Iscariot was taken by a particularly offensive brand of philistinism in aspiration of facilitating, and then maintaining, his entrance into the bourgeoisie. Of note: I adopt here the manner of greater men and paraphrase Flaubert, by which I mean ‘bourgeois’ to evoke a state of mind, rather than a state of pocket. In fairness, one usually follows the other.
>“This is, of course, not a sin. A weakness, to be sure—to fall prey to contemporary convention—but not a sin. The greatest sin is that of inauthenticity. You see, Iscariot considered himself an artist. With the salary of a technologist, he accumulated tchotchkes and some semiotic trappings of the artist’s ply. His home, tucked into exclusive hills of bus-unserved suburbs, became a shrine to the image of the artist. Upon its edifice, he placed his own crude simulacrum. Though too tired, too busy, too engrossed with the care of larval half-images of himself, he’d come home and perhaps pick up an expensive guitar—one of many!—to strum a few chords with soft fingers and remark sadly upon the state of the world, that one such as he could find time only for work. Such talent, squandered! he’d think to himself. ‘If only I could have all these tools and this home in the hills and spend all day creating art! Perhaps I’ll retire young—at sixty—and enjoy it all!’ This, of course, never happened. By the time his career fizzled out, so had his youth.
>“His was a displaced egocentrism. His desire for art and lust for material were at dissonant odds. Lust prevailed, as is its wont. Iscariot was a creature strictly of this world. There were some small betrayals along the way, but his greatest betrayal was to his own basic nature. We all aspire to mastery, Mr. Howl. Remember that.
>“Irregardless, within this mug, I have your medicine. You should be needing it soon.”
For the record, this >>20367722 is my (most recent) writing. Judge for yourself whether or not you want to listen to me from it. Also, input is welcome in general, frens.

i want to make a worldbuilding story but im stuck on the issue of wich races to include apart from fictional species like goblins and elves, because of the current political climate im so paranoid that some people might try to cancel me for not managing X or Y race in a way that satisfies the normalcunts to the point where im just considering making it a furry world and making everyone an antropomorphic animal so that nobody fucks with me