/lit/ - Literature

- You depend on your crew-mates for your life. That's a powerful bond with unfamiliar men, there's a dramatic gravity in those oaths and duties.

- Think of Lord Jim standing on the edge of the ship that he's certain is sinking (the passenger ship it's his duty to steer safely home). Far below him, in the darkness, bobs the lifeboat. If he jumps, he abandons the pilgrim passengers sleeping obliviously aboard.

- The sea uproots people from their settled contexts, makes them sea-men and anonymous Ishmaels, and as such they have a sort of bareness and fresh energy that fits with art's power to alienate the familiar.

- The sea is as close as you can get to nothing. It's barely even nature. It's abstract. It belongs to no fixed social world but spans the space between them.

- Sea stories are stories of modernity. 'All that is solid melts into air,' says Marx of the dawn of capitalism; really it flows out to the sea, as goods and commodities and men mustered out of anonymous ranks of labourers. The hazard of their story is the risk of the speculator.

- Sea stories are stories of the ancient past. All stories -- all interesting stories -- once came from across the sea. If you wanted stories other than those of farmers' bickering you'd hang out on the harbour-front and drink wine with the sailors, hear of catastrophes escaped, and cannibal princesses, and gods watching you from the groves above the shore.

- 'Two ships passing in the night.' The sea is vast, and humans are small, so all meetings are transient, and therefore weighted with melancholy. Perhaps you'll see that man in a Balinese port ten years from now, the man who saved your life -- will he be a beggar, a mercenary, an admiral in the sultan's fleet?

It is painfully clear to me that philosophy alone is not something that will ever produce a satisfactory account of why we live. The Enlightenment was an undertaking no less ambitious or prideful than Icarus' escape from Crete, and it has ended in the same way. Two significant threads of thought regarding this end with Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, and they are helpful in understanding the various tricks people use to escape pure rationality and return to some form of meaningful life.

Schmitt simply takes as given that meaning can be generated from within what he calls political groups, which are constituted by their (usually) latent capacity for violent war with those that threaten their way of life. In other words, Schmitt attributes to human nature the capacity to band together in meaningful groups that can produce meaningful life, separate from reason. That this flies in the face of the Enlightenment project is obvious, but that's the point; whereas the Enlightenment sought to leave nothing "in the dark," often coming dangerously close to denying the existence of human nature at all, Schmitt posits the existence of at least a remaining kernel that to this day produces meaning in vast sections of mankind.

One might say that on the other hand, Strauss is too systematic (or at least systematizing) to leave such an important mechanism unspoken of. So he posits instead, or at least hopes very much for, the existence of revelation as knowledge separate from and unaccountable to reason; revelation as axiom (is there any other kind?). An important difference between Strauss and Schmitt aside from the obvious is that to Strauss, the Christian theology (as opposed to the Jewish or Islamic theology) that is so widely accepted in the West is exactly what had allowed the Enlightenment to challenge revelation so successfully. As long as Schmitt's defense of way-of-life as such has so little recourse to anything larger, Strauss argues, he remains within the horizon of liberalism and only critiques it in its own terms.

Both thinkers reveal the difficulty of finding meaning under the contemporary zeitgeist. Whereas Schmitt would have us simply take a leap of faith and deny the capacity for reason to comment on our attachment to our way of life, Strauss would have us all become true believers. The consequences of Schmitt's thought stare us in the face after WW2. Strauss's seem totally incompatible with today, though I sympathize with him, especially considering the wealth of beauty revelation has inspired.

What can I read that comments on this?

>>18017194

ask me anything about poetry

>>6908746
that's provincial ploughman tier.

>Favourite novel and novelist
Novel: To The Lighthouse; Novelist: Dickens
>Favourite poetry book and poet.
Hart Crane: The Bridge
>Favourite play and playwright.
Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra
>Favourite philosopher.
Kant

>Favourite classical piece.
Winterreise
>Favourite popular music album.
Tom Waits - Small Change

>Favourite film.
The Searchers
>Favourite director.
Tarkovsky

>Favourite painter.
Bruegel
>Favourite painting.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

Everything I write feels as pathetically crafted as the type of prose I often critique harshly when I'm reading other authors. I hate myself for not having the ability despite so many tries. Maybe I'm not cut out for writing? Its all I want to do in life, but If I can't be happy with anything, why bother?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovbh4accBWg

I never tried learning a dead language.

I used duolingo for spanish. For two months i spent around fifteen minutes every single day. It worked. I went to spain for three weeks and now i can speak simple spanish with patient spaniards.

Bruegel, of course

Musée des Beaux Arts

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

>>5897946
why hate