/lit/ - Literature

>Be in school reading Crime and Punishment.
>Friend approaches and asks what I’m reading.
>Lie and tell her it’s nothing.
>Ferociously stuff book into bag.
>Feel deep irrational shame.
>She asks me about school, how I’m doing that sort of thing.
>Tell her I need to go.
>Watch myself leave.
>Hide in an empty room until I’m confident she’s gone.
>She is.
>Go back in original room and read.

>>3767327
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

--W. H. Auden, "Musee des Beaux Arts"

my relative importance in the grand scheme of things.