/lit/ - Literature

Anyone read the Frontier Thesis?

>>13932285
this one deals with western man attitudes to wilderness

>>13930197
this one, you can find it on b-ok.org

you wont regret it, trust me, one of the best books i read concerning myth and their power

>>13924412
yes, I've been spamming this book too. you should read it. get it on b-ok.org

>>13919658
yeah, this.

>>13918859
>greatest empire on earth.

Christianity was a crisis cult, the roman empire was rotting from the inside out when jesus begun to speak. you should read this book

>>13912735
it was

>Observing a prisoner exchange between the Iroquois and the French in upper New York in 1699, Cadwallader Colden is blunt: ". . . notwithstanding the French Commissioners took all the Pains possible to carry Home the French, that were Prisoners with the Five Nations, and they had full Liberty from the Indians, few of them could be persuaded to return." Nor, he has to admit, is this merely a reflection on the quality of French colonial life, "for the English had as much Difficulty" in persuading their redeemed to come home, despite what Golden would claim were the obvious superiority of English ways:

>No Arguments, no Intreaties, nor Tears of their Friends and Relations, could persuade many of them to leave their new Indian Friends and Acquaintance; several of them that were by the Caressings of their Relations persuaded to come Home, in a little Time grew tired of our Manner of living, and run away again to the Indians, and ended their Days with them. On the other Hand, Indian Children have been carefully educated among the English, cloathed and taught, yet, I think, there is not one Instance, that any of these, after they had Liberty to go among their own People, and were come to Age, would remain with the English, but returned to their own Nations, and became as fond of the Indian Manner of Life as those that knew nothing of a civilized Manner of Living.

>And, he concludes, what he says of this particular prisoner exchange "has been found true on many other Occasions."

>Benjamin Franklin was even more pointed: When an Indian child is raised in white civilization, he remarks, the civilizing somehow does not stick, and at the first opportunity he will go back to his red relations, from whence there is no hope whatever of redeeming him. But when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and have lived a while among them, tho' ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.

>>13891252

>>13867163
oh, im not sure, I've only read Ted and Ellul, his The Technological Society and also some of The Political Illusion tho dropped it half way, its actually very good, i should return to it, now im skimming through his PERSPECTIVES
ON OUR AGE (available at b-ok,org)

i also can heartily recommend this book, its not about technology per se but it explains a whole lot how we got to this place, also available from b-ok, a really good book, one of the best i read. its a kind of spiritual history of western civilization, technology is a substitute for a lost spiritual life, this book is really good

>>13866617
yeah you should read this book, its much more pro christian.

>>13864226
i would begin by reading about how archaic myth is a LIVED reality and not a separate realm of contemplation lice The Spectacle.

Georgio Agamben argued that The Spectacle is actually akin to the Glory Of God, since The Economy is basically a theological concept. his a complicated philosopher/historian and i dont want to say much more becouse i myself dont entirely understand him. but i can offer a good book concerning the Wests divorce from Myth.


also agamben lecture that deals with the theological concept of the economy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmEd20pThcw

>>13859009
this book.

>>13836313

>>13830401
This time his guide was the remarkable Penobscot Joe Polls. Thoreau heard him talk to muskrats, saw the strange phosphorescence of moosewood in a campfire, and finally achieved his meeting with utter wildness atop Mountain Ktaadn. Here at last was that reality he had heroically sought, that confrontation with the Other that had always been the great, unsuspected treasure of the New World. Here was Nature, savage, awful, and beautiful too:

"I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhanselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever. . ."

He felt its terrific presence then, as the old and vanished inhabitants had felt it everywhere, the presence of

"a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites,-to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we."

He felt possessed and unafraid of that possession:

"What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!-Think of our life in nature,-daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?"

As Thoreau well knew, these are the questions answered by all mythologies, and in this moment at least they were answered for him. Nature in such an untouched state, he reflected, must have made a thousand kindred revelations to the Indians that it had never made to the conquering white man. I think the key word here is "revelations"-to feel as the aborigines had that messages can come at any moment from divinity, that divinity has not been sealed off by canon and dogma and empty ritual, that miracles can happen for us. Thoreau sickened and died before he could go deeper in his quest, his last words revealing the profundity of his commitment to it: "Moose . . . Indian. . . ." But he left us enough evidence to suggest that he might have gone on to learn to write some words in that divine picture language that is myth, so to supersede Emerson who had said, "We too must write bibles." We too are writing them, Thoreau might have said: "I have had intelligence with the earth."

>>13829452
i can give you a recommendation about why the earth is being destroyed,

>>13803367
Most often, the rumors arose out of nothing more substantial than those recondite forces that drove the whites to fill up the continent's spaces with their presence. The ghastly story of the Donner Party should be understood as a parable of this, for here was a group like thousands of similar groups, traveling across barely charted spaces toward the vaguest rumors of More. According to their historian, C. F. McGlashan, many of them had been solid citizens of Ohio, Tennessee, Illinois, and Missouri, and yet here they were, crawling across the Great Plains, across a desert, and on into the high Sierras with scarcely a notion of their destination. McGlashan, interviewing the survivors, records that many had joined the procession without even knowing that it was going to California, only that it was going somewhere. Winter caught them in the mountains, imprisoning them in their miserable hovels until, perishing one after another, the survivors ate the frozen and emaciated corpses of the dead. Two Indian guides were revolted at such hunger until they themselves were shot and consumed as the desperate stragglers went over the pass and down into rescue.

Facing east from California's shores, as now we can, we have a clear view of this gigantic process, especially the portion of it that occurred west of the Mississippi. For out there the camera caught what we are pleased to call the "Winning of the West." Here are the track crews, shadowfaced, slouch-hatted men with their mules, laying track at two miles a day. Lonely figures are posed on bark-covered ties that stretch off into blank horizons. Rail tickets scream like circus posters, advertising transportation to "ALL POINTS IN THE MINING DISTRICTS." "Ho! for the GOLD MINES!" "1865! 1865!"

Here are the mining towns blasted out of the mountains with their tin roofs glinting in bleak contrast to the new wood of their walls and to the muddy streets and cluttered creeks. A jungle of advertising shingles hangs above the porches of the stores - Dentist, Wholesale Liquor Dealer, Bank - and beneath slouch the miners, shaggy, unkempt, hopeful. One sits on a crate in a Black Hills camp, a rifle across his knees to guard his claim. The names of the towns are Deadwood, Gold Hill, Montezuma's Works, Sugar Loaf.

To those who followed Columbus and Cortes the New World truly seemed incredible, not only because of what civilization had made of the Old World but because of the natural endowments of the one they now began to enter. The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the ocean, and the coasting whites with their nostrils full of salt and the sour odors of confinement recorded their delight with the odor of forests and verges in bloom. Giovanni di Verrazano in 1524 smelled the cedars of the East Coast a hundred leagues out. Raleigh's colonists scented what they thought a garden, though they would soon enough make it something else. The men of Henry Hudson's Half Moon, already disposed to hate and fear the natives, were temporarily disarmed by the fragrance of the New Jersey shore, while ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam through large beds of floating flowers.

Wherever they came inland they found that these announcements had been in no way false: the land, wilderness though it was, was a rich riot of color and sound, of game and luxuriant vegetation. Even if some of the most glowing descriptions of the New World were in fact realestate advertisements, given then as now to calculated falsehood, still the theme of beauty in abundance is so pervasive that it transcends any scheme, insisting its truth upon the reluctant and hesitant pens of the white observers. Had they been other than they were, they might have written a new mythology here. As it was, they took inventory, around the margins of which one feels the spectacular presence of America.

Waterfowl took flight under their advances with thunderous wings, and deer in unconcerned droves browsed lush meadowlands. Squirrels and huge turkeys barked and gobbled in the endless forests that stretched all the way from the coast to the huge river that Soto had crossed and recrossed and been buried in. Elsewhere ground fruits lavished themselves on the land: scarlet blankets of strawberries painted the bellies of the horses and the legs of the horsemen who rode through them, and swollen clusters of grapes bowered the streams and rivers.

>>13786991
The episode recounts how a huntsman out from the city accidentally discovers the natural man, Enkidu, roaming with the beasts of the field and releasing them from the huntsman's snares. Like his fellow creatures, Enkidu feeds on grasses, drinks from the stream, and beds down with the herd at night. The huntsman, terrified at the sight of this shaggy, skin-clad atavism, rushes back to the city to inform its mighty ruler/tyrant, Gilgamesh. The ruler then devises a scheme of capture, instructing the huntsman to procure a girl of the streets and take her to the place where Enkidu was seen drinking with the beasts. When the creature comes to water, the girl is to strip off her garment and entice him with her nakedness. Once he has embraced her, reasons Gilgamesh, the animals will recognize him as a human and not a fellow creature and will forsake him. Then in his loneliness the creature will be drawn to the world of men and forced to abandon his savage ways.

The plan works perfectly and Enkidu, who once released the captured beasts, is himself snared in the slim arms of the city girl. Gaster translates the result:

"For a whole week he dallied with her, until at last, sated with her charms, he arose to rejoin the herd. But the hinds and gazelles knew him no more for one of their own, and when he approached them they shied away and scampered off. Enkidu tried to run after them, but even as he ran he felt his legs begin to drag and his limbs grow taut, and all of a sudden he became aware that he was no longer a beast but had become a man. "

In this figure is a microcosmic record of the succession of one stage of mythology and culture by another, for his fate now lies in the city of men and not in the fields of animal freedom. From it he will go forth with Gilgamesh into what has become for him the wilderness to test himself against the decrees of the gods. And in the wilderness he will die, estranged from his old home.

In 1837 the new nation's insatiable lust for land finally produced a financial panic that spread back from the western frontier to the population centers of the East. The previous year had been the biggest yet in land sales, and an extent of territory the size of New England had passed into the control of the speculators. Now there was a crash that revealed not merely the enormous economic inflation of the times but their spiritual bankruptcy as well. Yet, surveying this scene, Horace Greeley could produce a remarkably characteristic solution: Move On: Go West. And those who could go did so, leaving those who could not stranded on their farms and in their little towns with outsized grid plans that would remain unrealized. Succeeding generations in this region would reap the crop of bitterness, frustration, and xenophobia that lurks there still -people, as the Midwesterner Glenway Wescott observed, born where they do not like to live.

The others went on. They bridged the great river and entered the grasslands that stretched all the way to the big mountains: tall grass prairies to the east, short grass plains westward, and beyond that the tough bunch grasses of the semidesert. This was the territory that had been described by Major Stephen Long as an uninhabitable desert. But closer experience revealed that the same blue-stem sod grass that grew in the rich lands of Illinois was to be found stretching west across the Mississippi. Henry Nash Smith has charted with clarity and grace the course of American thinking about this transMississippi region, and what is most striking is the evidence of the sudden realization that there were no limits to what could be done to America: that the advancing, driven people need not put up with any permanent barriers to their civilization or remain forever uneasy about the specter of the trackless West with its wild people. All of this too could be claimed for civilization. Within a very few years of the appearance on the charts of the "Great American Desert," men were planning the penetration of it by railroads.

Sometimes the rumors of western wealth seemed substantiated, as happened with the California gold strike at the end of the 1840s. These rumors quickened to fantastic life the old golden dream of the New World. As they ebbed, they left the West littered with haunted, stubble-cheeked prospectors, "eternals" seeking out lost lodes, rumors of Moctezuma's treasure, fabulous veins overlooked in earlier rushes, or caches of stolen jewels taken from explorers and settlers by marauding Indians. Pathetic scavengers, these, moping through a gigantic, glittering landscape and seeing nothing of it except the next horizon.

>>13782980
The separation from nature and myth and the commitment to history is emphasized more dramatically and with greater political and cultural results in the new religion's monotheistic character. Though possibly there had been parallel conceptions among other peoples-and Freud based an entire theory of Jewish history on the short-lived monotheism of Amenhotepllkhnaton of Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty, whence he claimed the captive nation derived the idea-it was the Israelites who established monotheism in the spiritual geography of humankind. And with it came the terrible concomitants of intolerance and commandments to destroy the sacred items of others (Exodus 23:23- 24; 34:13-16) and to "utterly destroy" polytheistic peoples wherever encountered. Deuteronomy 7:16 commands the holy nation to "consume all the people which the LORD thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither shalt thou serve their gods. . . ." And Deuteronomy 13:16 goes so far as to specify that entire pagan cities must be offered up as burnt sacrifices to the one god, as odors pleasing to him. For polytheism is like imagery connected to nature in its concrete particulars and in its numina. It is for this reason that whatever savageries primitive peoples have visited upon one another, they have usually feared to desecrate idols and altars: there was felt to be too much power in these things, and besides, the gods of one people were quite often recognizable to their adversaries. This goes far to explain why the conception of genocide is foreign to polytheistic cultures. But the distinctions raised in the covenant between religion and idolatry are like some visitation of the khamsin to wilderness peoples as yet unsuspected, dark clouds over Africa, the Americas, the Far East, until finally even the remotest islands and jungle enclaves are struck by fire and sword and by the subtler weapon of conversion-by-ridicule (Deuteronomy 2:34; 7:2; 20:16-18, Joshua 6:17-21).