/lit/ - Literature

>>7848120
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This website is going to shit. It's not letting me post with my secure tripcode. Something needs to be done about this immediately.

Everyone lives in their own particular internal atmosphere or season. There are these sharp dream-images of places where we dwell, similar to when a song is stuck in your head, that we return to again and again. It can be a sound, a voice, a memory, a mood, or something purely imaginary. The unconscious is not as nasty as Freud made it out to be. Sometimes rationality can cool the "truth" we know in those moments when we are still in bed half-asleep to the point where we take comfort in apathy. If something fits in that dream-setting and warms you to action, it is true and something you should kindle in the iron cage of logic.

No wonder that Alexander (5) carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; — not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man's thought becomes a modern man's speech. Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense by the pains which be takes to secure for his children that intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that he becomes the founder of a family.

5. Alexander the Great of Macedon, (356 B.C.-323 B.C.), conquered the Persian Empire; Plutarch's biography of Alexander says that he carried the Iliad with him