/lit/ - Literature

Don't breed.

When will you accept that humanity is an irreparably maladjusted species and do the only honourable thing which is to deny our programming and stop reproducing, walking hand in hand into extinction like brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal?

>>4721722
Human conciousness is itself a mental illness. We have evolved this feature beyond functionality straight into the domain of perpetual torment.

>FRANZEN

I had bad dorm rooms, and I’d landed in a nerdy situation as a prospective physics major. There were very few cute girls, and those few had no interest in me. My only significant ambition was to get laid, and I was failing spectacularly at it, for reasons now obvious to me but completely invisible at the time. I thought about transferring to a different school, but then I realized that if I majored in German I could go to Europe for a year, and that things might be better there.

Things were not better there, at least not girlwise. But I came back to the States less outrageously immature. And every once in a while a person’s life feels like a novel, and the eight weeks in the middle of my last year of college were a time like that. Everything came together quickly, all the stuff that had been latent suddenly crystallized, and I felt transformed in the space of eight weeks. I became a human being. By the end of that January, I was having sex with the person I would end up married to for fourteen years, and I’d become a determined, focused writer who wanted to do nothing but write ambitious novels.

Why is Franzen so beta bros?

Who are some lesser-known writers/philosophers who would be considered 'extreme' /lit/

pic related

Calling all Norwegians,

When will you give us his magnum opus? When will you translate it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Wessel_Zapffe

Never seen this guy discussed on /lit/ before and he seems pretty interesting. Anybody here read him? How does he compare with Schop's essays on pessimism?

Read Zapffe. His solution was to live like a Tomato as much as possible and not to have kids. I'm surprised he did not suicide.

Anyone know if we'll ever see an English translation of Zapffe's 'On The Tragic'?

For those interested, his essay 'The Last Messiah' can be read here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/104610851/Peter-Wessel-Zapffe-The-Last-Messiah

I keep it saved on my computer and read it every few months because it instills something of a sobering satisfaction that is calming to me.

Consciousness is maladaptive like the horns of the irish elk, technology and mass society only makes it worse

Ok guys, so I just read The last Messiah, and was blown away, are there any other english translations of Zapffe's work online? I have tried in vain to find 'On the tragic' so I'm guessing this has never been translated which is a damn shame. If anyone knows of anything else out there please let me know.

I'm thinking of reading Ligotti next ('Conspiracy against the human race). Anyone has any other pessimist lit they recommend besides the obvious (Schopenhauer & Cioran also come to mind).