/lit/ - Literature

Your heroic battle against this enemy is a lie you tell yourself. You are no hero and you are not impressive. shakespeare would laugh at you, walking farce #blindblindpill

>>17104211

yes.

polyglot Chad coming through

> Becker's notion of a communal "hero system" is an extension of the conquest of death through individual heroics. As a symbol-made creature I need not literally survive death in battle to become immortal. I make a conquest of death symbolically when I win an argument, a chess match, a lucrative contract, or the hand of a fair lady. For I do not merely win in these contests, I kill. Almost every sport thrives on phrases like "kill, slaughter, destroy, annihilate, bury," and so on. Through such killings I grow great. If I kill often enough, I will live forever. In a society in which winning is not everything but the only thing, we need merely compare the faces of winners and losers at the end of a Super Bowl, a World Series, or a national spelling bee to realize what the stakes have really been.

> Unfortunately, because the world abounds with articulate debaters, master chess players, shrewd businessmen, and irresistible courtly lovers, my chances of killing consistently are not as good as my chances of getting killed rather often. In which case, rather than put up with these lesser deaths I will simply join the higher powers and grow great by proxy. If I cannot play in the Super Bowl or be president of General Motors, at least I can sit in the stands and root for the Chicago Bears or buy GM cars with names like Firebird or Challenger and enter the lists with death on the freeway. Or if I cannot write like Shakespeare or Joyce, or think like Aquinas or Wittgenstein, still I can accumulate a great library and absorb their immortal rays by osmosis. Each new book I place on the shelves is one more gold piece in my strongbox: I grow, I prosper. But of course no immortality system is infallible; even the Chicago Bears can lose Super Bowls and the Boston Celtics, NBA championships. And if they door if my stocks fall, my car is totaled, or my library burns upthere is nothing for it: I die.

I seriously can't wait for this book to arrive