/lit/ - Literature

When was the last time you had a religious experience? I listened to Steven R. Smith’s album Cities in Decline and its tone struck me. There is something profoundly sobering about this album. Something austere and lacking triviality. Music for a halocaust. An all encompassing bleakness that seems to place you into the solitude of nature. Something deadly. When was the last time you experienced some sublimity that swept you away? No thoughts, no words, just impressions as you felt yourself surrender to its pervasive force. I have become exceedingly weary of triviality and tedium. I have become exceedingly weary of these in my own mind, I often feel very much trapped within myself, within the limits of my juvenile and limited paradigms. Also trapped within the limits of the very juvenile and limited paradigms of the culture at large. Nothing is sacred, nothing elevates or edifies and there is a stark lack of impetus to reach beyond oneself. We stagnant and wheel about in our grooves, in our ideologies, paradigms; our memes and movements. What might have it felt like to transcend this? What is the phenomenology of those sages and seers before the mechanisms of modernity swallowed their gods? How would the Greeks look at us? Would they pity us? If I have understood Nietzsche, they would not be so weak as to pity us. They would have seen the squirming and languishing demons that we are and put us out of our misery. The doughty spears of the Iliad would have pierced us not as they did the noble brothers who fought amongst themselves as worthy opponents, but as inferior beings being released from their wretchedness to the underworld. Would this be our salvation or are we too far gone to be able to receive such an honour? I suspect we are not worthy. When was the last time you had a religious experience?