/lit/ - Literature

>>16489888
>90% of office work is total bullshit, why not just automate everything and let people spend their lives meaningfully instead of making spreadsheets

Nice trips.

But, honestly, what does "spend their lives meaningfully" mean? So many people, so many of us, spend our free time these days doing... what? Watching porn? Masturbating? Getting drunk? Listening to bad music?

There is some validity to the idea that work gives men's life meaning. Maybe not the soulless office work of so many, these days. But what about honest toil? Tilling the soil, hammering huge things together, digging ditches, repairing things?

Do you really think everyone can be a poet, a painter, a sculptor, a philosopher? I think this is a flaw that a lot of left-wing people have. They believe that if the workers are simply liberated from the soullessness of modern work, they will become grand and flowery and beautiful. And I do believe that a lot of modern work IS soulless. But the average worker, even the average highly-skilled worker, is not just some genius in waiting. He or she is not someone who would suddenly "spend their lives meaningfully" if the pressures of the workday were removed.

This is not to say that much of modern work is not soulless and brutal and destroying. It IS. I don't dispute that. But you cannot free all these people from daily work and then expect them to suddenly be enlightened and magnificent. I guarantee you, the vast majority of them would spend their new free time watching porn and jerking off. Is that how you want them to live life?

Have you ever noticed that the vast majority of great artists just fucking cheat the system? Faulkner basically did not work a daily job, for a long time. Neither did Cormac McCarthy. Tolstoy and Byron were nobles with a steady stream of income and credit. Bach, Shakespeare, Mozart, all had the patronage of an aristocracy. Bukowski worked a factory job until he realized he couldn't, then told that job to fuck off. Artists fucking slip the system, and they ALWAYS will. Artists, great artists, great geniuses, always slip the noose of society's confines. They live outside the confines of everyday life, and they ALWAYS do, no matter what. If you, right now, in 2020, have not figured out a way to wriggle out of the normal strictures of everyday life, you are probably not a great poet, a great painter, a great musician, a great philosopher. And giving you UBI would probably not let you BECOME one of those things. The real geniuses always figure things out. The real geniuses always land on their feet, as if blessed by God.

This thread makes me take stock of various things I am doing right now, writing-career-wise.

I have gotten multiple short stories and multiple poems published in the last five years, which has been quite nice. I even got a poem published in a pretty prominent intellectual journal, and I was even paid for it. That was pretty exciting.

I wrote a ton of poems all on a similar theme in 2018 and 2019, and my hope has been to get enough of them published that I can then collect them all and publish the collection. I've been working towards that, slowly but surely.

>>16317306 has also made me think that I am currently enrolled getting an MA in English Literature. I am writing a master's thesis as a result of this, and my thesis adviser believes that the work I am doing, and the subject I am pursuing, are both rather interesting and original. He has encouraged me to keep the thesis itself short, 40 pages or less, because he thinks if I do I have decent odds of getting it published in an academic journal.

Also, most excitingly of all, I am coming closer and closer to the end of a major work I have been writing for the better part of a year. It is a mixture of prose and poetry with Catholic symbolism woven throughout. When it is done, and when I have finished the editing process, I am eager to try and get it published. I actually have some contacts that should prove very useful in doing this, given the nature of the work itself. And this work is only the first work, the first of many more such works to come, in a huge story that will take me years to finish, all told. When it is done, if I'm lucky, it will be the greatest work of art of the 21st century.

>>15844817
Good post.

In general I think that anyone who is pessimistic about the Catholic Church, who thinks the Church is "doomed", has not really dove into the weeds of what's actually happening on the ground. The Church's renewal will come from good Catholic laity, good Catholic families, good priests, good monks, and good nuns, and there's more of all of those these days than there have been in decades. They haven't started to have a MAJOR impact yet, but that's because the renewal is in its really early days. The really positive signs aren't even a decade old yet, and it takes a very, very long time to change the Church. But I actually feel extremely hopeful about the future of the Catholic Church. I think the past 100 years or so was so corrupt and so wicked that it's on par with the Renaissance or the Arian Heresy. But I think the Church is on the verge of beginning to swing into a period of serious reform and renewal, EXACTLY like it did after both the Renaissance and the Arian Heresy. The Church always reforms from its evils, in the end. It dies to sin and is reborn anew.

>>15659056
I'll pray for you, Anon, for whatever it's worth.

If you think that Jesus literally rose from the dead, how is anything in this thread persuasive?

Writers and poets of /lit/, what are some non-literary influences on your work? What influences your novels, short stories, etc. from outside the realm of literature? Artwork, music, film and television, etc.. I'm fascinated by the idea of writers and poets being influenced by other media.

Writers and poets of /lit/, are you working on anything related to the plague and its effects? I've had a vague idea for a short story about a romance that takes place in a city under quarantine. Nothing definitive yet, but the very beginnings of the idea are circling around my mind.

Writers and poets of /lit/, are you guys working on anything related to the virus and its effects? I've personally thought about writing a short story about a romance that blossoms in a city under quarantine. I only have vague ideas

I'll echo the comments in here that Jesus is much less "nice" in the actual Gospels than He is portrayed in popular culture. He is intensely loving and kind, but He can also be frightening and severe. Consider this passage from Luke:

>At that time some of those present told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. To this He replied, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered this fate? No, I tell you. But unless you repent, you too will all perish. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam collapsed on them: Do you think that they were more sinful than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you. But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”

But doesn't this ultimately serve to make His claim of divinity more compelling? People like to say that the Old Testament and the New Testament depict two different versions of God. But if you read the Gospels, Jesus is a mixture of kind and merciful but also concerned with justice and punishment. And, for that matter, if you actually read back through the Old Testament, numerous passages talk about Yahweh's mercy and forgiveness, in addition to everything depicting His wrath. I think a good faith reading of the Bible is more than sufficient to prove that both testaments talk about the same God.