/lit/ - Literature

There is indeed a certain low and moderate sort of poetry, that a man may well enough judge by certain rules of art; but the true supreme and divine poetry is above all rules and reason... it does not exercise but ravishes and overwhelms our judgments.

Post your own essays or passages from essays and discuss essay writing in general :)

The following is a short passage from an essay I was planning to write and which I shall probably revise and extend hereafter:
The pandemic represents, in my mind, the beginning of the end of liberalism.
The unbearably toxic and selfish conceit of individual freedoms―that is, of freedoms from the state that are nonetheless and paradoxically insured by that same entity and that, indeed, can only exist because of the state, but which are called "unalienable"―is at the very foundation of our nation, yet it has also been shown to be the greatest evil to our nation's well being and one which we appear to no longer be able to tolerate. That our nation actually, at some point, educated it's children to embrace these liberal values, and that we still hold these values as sacred, may not unreasonably appear quite absurd but the damage that unregulated speech does was not as obvious then as it is now―except, of course, in special cases like sedition.
Necessarily, now as the internet has brought us all closer together―so that the exchange of ideas happens many times and information readily flows from many different sources―we have become a more vulnerable society―vulnerable to ideas that is.
This isn't the first time in history that this sort of thing has happened; just look at the ages in which people flocked from the sparsely populated rural areas to the highly concentrated urban areas. We saw plagues, fires, floods, and many other disasters, natural or otherwise, which effected great numbers of people and even greater numbers of people than would have otherwise died had the disaster struck in the old rural towns. Yet people did not give up on building cities, on the contrary, they built more and expanded the cities that existed into great metropolises, and even more people flocked to live in these urban areas; and why? because the city was where "it" was happening, and it was where one could "make it" if they want to do such a thing, either for themselves or for their posterity. This was the zeitgeist.
The internet, likewise, is something that, despite it's flaws, no one wants to get rid of because of it's great many advantages, yet we also must not ignore it's great potential to do harm. We are information machines after all, and "garbage in, garbage out" is the inescapable law; in an information society, then, information must be regulated if we hope to keep from dysfunctionality and disaster.

>Lucian's essays but with christcuck morality slapped onto them
Nah thanks, I'll drop this hack and stick to the Greeks.

Are montaigne, la rochefoucauld, pascal, bruyére worth reading in their original middle french, or will an english translation do me fine? What am I missing out on aesthetically or semantically? Anything at all?

My french is at about A-level, sucks, but I'm reading Cioran in french and enjoying it. These four seem to me a little harder though, probably the equivalent of reading Emerson in english.

>"Nor is there anything more remarkable about Socrates than the fact that in his old age he finds time to take dance lessons and play instruments, and considers it well spent".
Can somebody explain me this observation from Montaigne in On Experience?.

Reading an essay of his every night before going to sleep may just be the best decision I've ever made in my life.

I love this lil nigga like you wouldn't believe.

Try to name a comfier writer. You can't.

Way too, way too, way too comfy

>>18754286
Montaigne

My writing is terrible. Thankfully, I am such agreeable company this poses no issue as I write to myself.

I've been reading the Florio translation, but does anyone recommend something else? Does anyone know what Harold Bloom preferred?

After reading his essay "On Smells" I'm convinced that Montaigne must have been massively autistic.

Any books for life-affirming Christianity? Something in the vein of Montaigne?

>"Pure Ignorance, leaving men totally dependant on others was much more salutary and more learned than such vain verbal knowledge."
How can anyone consider this absolute tard a philosopher or a genius? He's literally advocating for the censorship of biblical translations so people would have to depend on lousy priests to know about their religion rather than letting them read the texts for themselves. I thought intellectuals were supposed to be against the system, not vapid bootlickers of the church. I've never read a more close-minded and bigoted philosopher than Montaigne, not even Aquinas was this fucking unbearable.

>writes an essay on friendship and love
>slanders homoeroticism and homosexual love while praising straight love
>cites Achilles and Patroclus and Plato's dialogues to justify his flawed opinion but conveniently forgets about instances like Hadrian and Antinous, Alexander and Hephaestion and David and Jonathan
I'm sorry but this guy is a fucking hack and I'm not gonna read anything written by his pen ever again.

I'm trying to read through Montaigne but his essays look repetitive and awfully boring. Is it just a compilation of shitposts?

Was he retarded? What the fuck is this shit even about?

http://essays.quotidiana.org/montaigne/thumbs/

Is there such a thing as a personality that can encompass all that a person is? Forget ontology for a minute and think in terms of psychology? Are we all just an infinite number of personalities that react to stimuli differently - or is there such a thing as a unified soul? I think this is the question he's getting at.

“We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversey and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment. And there is much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people.”

Was he a genius or an idiot? Is this quote relevant or rubbish? What exactly did he mean by this? Is there a deeper meaning or is it really as surface as it appears to be?

Does /lit/ like Michel de Montaigne? Where should I start with him?

Montaigne was a crypto-atheist