/lit/ - Literature

>>22521110
100%

>>22342644
I agree absolutely with the thrust of what you're saying, except
>Trying to find fulfilment through knowledge now seems unwholesome, gnostic and arrogant to me.
Reading and learning is a part of doing things. It expands your world and puts you in touch with powerful, alien forces.

I think Deleuze squares the circle here: he's a very thinky guy, he never really travelled, he never did much outside of reading & writing, but his whole philosophy is about finding out what you can do with your body and mind, about expanding your capacities and connecting to the world around you.

Part of why I like reading is because I need to actively do something about the fleeting sensations and emotions that would otherwise rush by like a landscape from a car window. Thinking hard about them is like getting out of the car and exploring on foot. It's not trying to boil them down to some abstract essence, piercing the demiurge's veil to achieve gnosis - it's about connecting to them more closely.

Anyway, to answer your question directly: check out Deleuze. He's the king of philosophy about 'actually doing things', and he's the enemy of all the world-haters and life-deniers who prefer empty abstractions to unique actualities.

>to "win" the game; make a lot of money, get a beautiful wife, have lots of kids.
>to achieve nirvana and break the eternal cycle of reincarnation.
These are just to sides of the same bleak life-hating worldview. They both hold that there's something external to the actual flow of life that justifies it, some end goal or ideal against which the actual unique realities of the people you meet and the moments you experience and the constant improvisations of your will count for nothing, are only worth anything if they're means to reach these abstract ends.

>>21938562
NTA but he's absolutely correct.

If plot purely were what mattered, people would read nothing but Wikipedia synopses. The shifts in mood you get in those 'in-between' scenes, the echoes and contrasts between characters' inner lives, the sense of an interconnected world and the rhythm of real experience -- these are essential parts of the pleasure of reading, and in many ways the plot is only there to give them a pretext, to act as a scaffold around which to spin threads not so easy to condense into a synopsis.

Here's a very crude analogy: If you invited me to your house for dinner, and treated our conversation, our sense of the night falling in the garden outside, our jokes and reminiscences and allusions to friends past -- if you treated them as nothing but conventionally necessary padding around the real purpose, that of chomping down on a roast, then I'd perhaps think you a good cook but, even more so, I'd think you a poor and insensitive and unimaginative host.

>>21824742
Just dive into the story first, because:
(1) from my experience, I'm much more creative when I'm in the thick of the story and seeing unexpected connections emerge between specific details than when I'm trying to create some abstract high-level overview; and
(2) because having a finished story will always be more creatively satisfying than having a sprawling lore document that you never get round to turning into an actual finished work.

>>21797569
>>21797127
>>21797169
>>21797244
>>21797485