/lit/ - Literature

It’s genuinely bug syndrome. They can’t really grasp the profundity of experience, anything is very literal for them. Love is not simply felt as some ephemeral force as it is in the west, it is reduced to some cause and effect, and even if it in fact actually is that, it should be explained in such a way but not experienced in such a way- yet they experience life through this categorisation. Notice how their morality functions. Again I don’t speak to fundamental truth here, but it is healthier to view morality as a sort of personal quest for some true ideal, it motivates passion and sacrifice. They don’t really share this personal conception of morality and operate more on shame culture, as in, morality is not “what is right” regardless of society (think about how western heroes always go against the system to do what is right), morality for them is “what is helpful”, what will motivate social harmony- it is not within the individuals right. Experience and meaning is decentralised in the bugman east, it isn’t personal or ineffable, it is a problem the experts who rule you have already solved, and you live via that lens. In this world, sentimentality can only be extremely forced and almost insecure in how saccharin it is (see any anime) much like your common atheist materialist going on about how we are stardust or whatever, it lacks any non verbal profundity, it lacks that twinge of commonly understood experience. This is essential to truly magical literature. Even writers like Nabokov who focus much more on craft than sincerity “get” this in some sense. Easterners simply don’t, or at least the vast majority don’t.