/lit/ - Literature

This meme actually works on several levels.

I started reading Decline of the west by Spengler last month but unfortunately didnt finished. I started reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and I really enjoyed it.

It's a really indecisive , but I want to here some one else's opinion.

Any ideas. I'm already reading decine of the west by Oswald Spengler

>
“Man was, and is, too shallow and cowardly to endure the fact of the mortality of everything living. He wraps it up in rose-coloured progress-optimism, he heaps upon it the flowers of literature, he crawls behind the shelter of ideals so as not to see anything. But impermanence, the birth and the passing, is the form of all that is actual -- from the stars, whose destiny is for us incalculable, right down to the ephemeral concourses on our planet. The life of the individual -- whether this be animal or plant or man -- is as perishable as that of peoples of Cultures. Every creation is foredoomed to decay, every thought, every discovery, every deed to oblivion. Here, there, and everywhere we are sensible of grandly fated courses of history that have vanished. Ruins of the "have-been" works of dead Cultures lie all about us. The hybris of Prometheus, who thrust his hand into the heavens in order to make the divine powers subject to man, carries with it his fall. What, then, becomes of the chatter about "undying achievements"?”

Read Man and Technics.

> Animals are free, little worlds in a big world - the cosmic - closed off as microcosms and set up against the macrocosm. And, more and more decisively as the animal kingdom unfolds its history, the dual direction of dual being, of the masculine and the feminine, manifests itself.
The feminine stands closer to the Cosmic. It is rooted deeper in the earth and it is immediately involved in the grand cyclic rhythms of Nature. The masculine is freer, more animal, more mobile - as to sensation and understand- ing as well as otherwise - more awake and more tense.

I really like this truth. I don’t know of anyone except Jung (and Spengler is a lot more focused) who puts it this succinctly.

> Primevally, too, woman is the seeress, and not because she knows the future, but because she is the future. The priest merely interprets the oracle; the woman is the oracle itself, and it is Time that speaks through her.
The man makes History, the woman is History. Here, strangely clear yet enigmatic still, we have a dual significance of all living happenings - on the one hand we sense cosmic flow as such, and on the other hand the chain and train of successive individuals brings us back to the microcosms themselves as the recipients, containers, and preservers of the flowing. It is this" second" history that is characteristically masculine - political, social, more conscious, freer, and more agitated than the other.

Earlier
>[footnote] It was about 1000 A.D. and therefore contemporaneously with the beginning of the Roman- csque style and the Crusades - the first symptoms of a new Soul - that Abbot Gerbert (pope Sylvester,II), the friend of the Emperor Otto m, invented the mechanism of the chiming wheel-clock. In Germany too, the first tower-clocks made their appearance, about 12.00, and the pocket watch somewhat later. Observe the significant association of time measurement with the edifices of religion.

On destiny

> All of us are conscious. as being aware. of space only. and not of time

And the introduction of time into forms
> Goethe speaks somewhere of the ..principle of reasonable order that we bear within ourselves and could impress as the seal of our power upon everything that we touch" - if all law is a fetter which our world-dread hurries to fix upon the incrowding sensuous, a deep necessity of self-preservation, so also the invention of a time that is knowable and spatially representable within causality is a later act of this same self-preservation, an attempt to bind by the force of notion the tormenting inward riddle that is doubly tormenting to the intellect that has attained power only to find itself defied. Always a subtle hatred· underlies the intellectual process by which

ITT: Chad quotes.
>"Optimism is cowardice."

>>16719065
>what predictions
all of them

Physiological expression is an offshoot of civilization. People in alpine areas develop different physical characteristics than those in coastal areas. People in polar climates develop different temperaments and characteristics than those in equatorial climates. Forensic scientists can find a person's home town based on the levels mineral deposits in their bones. Psychologically as well, it's generally obvious that people with a healthy psychological temperament are all around healthier and in better shape than people with negative temperaments, chronic stress, poverty, etc. Finally the diet somebody eats makes a huge difference in their body makeup. People who eat lots of meat, such as Inuit, certain African tribes, Argentinians, etc. generally develop a stockier build with long term negative health effects while people who eat lots of rice, vegetables, and fish such as Japanese, Chinese, Indians, tend to be slimmer and have overall longer life spans. Another example is that Muslims, who don't as a rule eat pork or drink alcohol, don't generally have that piggish engorged look that chronic beer and hot-dog consumers have. Americans on the other hand, save for the very wealthy, almost always have issues with excessive body fat and health problems because of monotonous corn and fluoride diet they are fed.

The science of physiognomy is also civilizational. During the 18th century it aligned with the powers of European colonialism, but now the Western zeitgeist has turned it's previously colonial quest for the infinite inwards, so any implication of physical being or limitations is seen as heretical and science is now used to deconstruct concepts like gender which naturally impose physical limitations.

The point is you should eat a lot of fish and avoid alcohol. Practice fasting and determine for yourself what foods increase your energies and well being and which foods diminish them.

Why have right wingers been unable to grapple with post-colonialism?
A lot of these protests and ethnic tensions we're seeing now were predicted and accurately described by Spengler, and are not inherently left or right so much as they are a reaction against modernity mixed with resentful bitching.
Yet it seems like most right wing parties are trying to live in a past without mass communications/transportation infrastructure and hung up on defending capitalism of all things. It's delusional, and as far as I know only one right winger party (Harper's Progressive Conservatives) has managed to gain the vote of immigrant groups.
Why is this? So many boomers are just content to live in imaginary land and over the last decade social dialogue seems to have been reduced to twitter shots.

Spengler gave me some great one-liners:
"Man is a beast of prey"
"Optimism is cowardice"
And when I'm feeling particularly edgy:
"There is but one end to all the conflict, and that is death—the death of individuals, of peoples, of cultures."