/lit/ - Literature

>>20487090
Notes from Underground desu

Do you guys usually read multiple books at once or do you just stick with one? I'm in the latter camp, mainly because I'm stupid and don't like having to deal with several things at once.

Rec me some good serials/short stories I can read online. I'm miserable and bored out of my fucking mind

Tell me some books that talk about either failed suicides and the aftermath or the effect of a successful suicide. Ideally non-fiction.

>>16722567
I think that I understand this viewpoint so I will try to explain. I have a master's degree in math and decided not to go to graduate school to pursue a PhD, and instead work in industry.

In academia, the reason that it may have felt soul sucking is because it is very personal and it is much more than a job. In academia, you are taking something you love and harnessing it as your career. If one's love of philosophy is direclty antithetical to the work that one does in philosophy (citing papers, specializing, etc), then one can feel that it is particularly hurtful since it is one's passion. In contrast, it is clear to most people that CS is a job like any other job, so the expectation is different, and the things that one is interested in remain unsullied.

Anothe reason which was that it was very disheartening to see the future careers of people who studied pure subjects in academia, in my case, math. Mediocre graduate students (at a top university) who were still very talented and hard working were relegated to teaching for a low salaries at small local colleges. It is a particularly disheartening shift to go from working with very advanced math at the cutting edge of your field to repeatedly teaching kids calculus and linear algebra. Academia feels very much like a winner take all game. If you are not at the top of your undergraduate class, you wont get into top graduate programs. If you are not the best in your graduate cohort, you won't get good postdoc positions / professorships. In the end, most people leave academia for this reason. The reason that academia can be soul crushing is the fact that a love of knowledge and natural curiosity is crushed in this way by the great machine.

>hundreds of posts
>still no Goya

>>11329618
fuck off normie

>>11329681
no it isnt that i cant feel its that the human experience pales in comparison to the artistic. otoh something seems wrong, gluttonous artificial and decadent in living your life vicariously through eg books

Investigation of a Dog is his best work, IMO. Tucked away, so lost you can only find it in his complete stories--it's really, really worth reading. Only about 40 agonizing pages but it basically perfectly encapsulates the essence of the history of the world and the human condition--and so fucking beautifully too:

>To talk to him, or even to any of the others, about such things would be pointless. I know what course the conversation would take. He would urge a slight objection now and then, but finally he would agree -- agreement is the best weapon of defense -- and the matter would be buried: why indeed trouble to exhume it at all? And in spite of this there is a profounder understanding between my neighbor and me, going deeper than mere words. I shall never cease to maintain that, though I have no proof of it and perhaps am merely suffering from an ordinary delusion, caused by the fact that for a long time this dog has been the only one with whom I have held any communication, and so I am bound to cling to him. "Are you after all my colleague in your own fashion? And ashamed because everything has miscarried with you? Look, the same fate has been mine. When I am alone I weep over it; come, it is sweeter to weep in company." I often have such thoughts as these and then I give him a prolonged look. He does not lower his glance, but neither can one read anything from it; he gazes at me dully, wondering why I am silent and why I have broken off the conversation. But perhaps that very glance is his way of questioning me, and I disappoint him just as he disappoints me. In my youth, if other problems had not been more important to me then, and I had not been perfectly satisfied with my own company, I would probably have asked him straight out and received an answer flatly agreeing with me, and that would have been worse even than today's silence. But is not everybody silent exactly in the same way? What is there to prevent me from believing that everyone is my colleague, instead of thinking that I have only one or two fellow inquirers -- lost and forgotten along with their petty achievements, so that I can never reach them by any road through the darkness of ages or the confused throng of the present: why not believe that all dogs from the beginning of time have been my colleagues, all diligent in their own way, all unsuccessful in their own way, all silent or falsely garrulous in their own way, as hopeless research is apt to make one? But in that case I need not have severed myself from my fellows at all, I could have remained quietly among the others, I had no need to fight my way out like a stubborn child through the closed ranks of the grownups, who indeed wanted as much as I to find a way out, and who seemed incomprehensible to me simply because of their knowledge, which told them that nobody could ever escape and that it was stupid to use force.

tfw college professor said "sweating intensely in any conversation and valuing art over pleasure are for people who don't like to think," and that we should be out having sex and partying, just enjoying ourselves and such

I asked him if he at least cried at night before he slept, but then he just snickered at me.