/lit/ - Literature

>>16452987
Some are

If I'm trying to write in iambic pentameter, do I just need to make sure each line is only ten syllables? I'm not sure I understand the unstressed/stressed pattern and the idea of the foot. Is it possible to write a ten syllable line and still have it be "wrong" so to speak? How? How does it change with dactylic hexameter, besides being twelve syllables instead of ten?

>>12867736
> the French Revolution and Marx are major, major events.
so too is Christianity, by the way, the meaning of the Middle Ages, and other things. i'm not a serious Catholic, even if my favorite thinker is, but one thing that has happened to me along the way is a much deeper appreciation of the great wisdom traditions and in particular the one that has played an enormous role in shaping the intellectual culture of the West as well.

as i've said before, i'm never out to just bash the West in the name of Marx, or China, or anything else like this. European culture is a remarkable and beautiful thing also, and i think a renewed appreciation for its meaning and contribution to the world will come again someday. right now people cannot identify with the victims of its past transgressions quickly enough, but this is often done for terribly cynical reasons, and that in turn because of a shift in culture into its late-postmodern hyper-mimetic stance, the internet, recent political shifts, and lots of other stuff. a renewed appreciation for the meaning of Christianity at least would be to my mind an improvement in things, as well as removing some of the daggers from Plato's body so that we can see how significant he was as well. the awesome work that is done by Augustine, and lots of other things.

right now the world is in just in a fucking free-fall out of reality and engaged in a hate-fest of unprecedented proportions. that sucks, but there is a reason for it, i think. doing the deep dive into philosophy has helped me to understand why that is, and why it's a terrible idea to try to continue to fight ideological battles that really belong to the past century rather than the future. i think if we want to move past the fallout the reading is necessary, such that the Revolutions can be understood properly, that we do not repeat them pointlessly, and perhaps someday we can understand why it was that industrialized society has taken the course that it has taken.

I didn't read 72 books either but just go at your own pace, OP. Don't get too mad at yourself. Like Jordan Peterson (I know he is a meme, I'm trying to be comedic while giving real advice) said, "treat yourself like someone you are trying to help."

I read 36 books last year and I'm making it a rule now that each year, one of my New Years resolutions is to read more books than I did the year before. I know last year I fucked around a bunch and could have read more than I did, so this year I can definitely do at least 37, and if I do that each year, read at least one more book than I did the previous year, it's always manageable. It's not an extreme change, like going from 0 books to 72, just the tiniest most imperceptible bit, but over the years I'll continue to read a decent amount each year. If I make it to middle age, I will have read a vast swathe of the canon. Even if you read zero books right now, most people don't read at all, if you keep it up and read a little more every year it won't be long before you are reading a book every month, which is way better than normies do.

you can do it bro, we are all gonna make it

>Shakespeare also seemed too intelligent to truly believe in an afterlife, as I think most people are

>>12631790
it is not so much of a stretch to say that from a certain perspective continental theory really is the theory and practice of hell, and Land is hardly the worst guide to it:

>The logical consequence of Social Darwinism is that everything of value has been built in Hell.

>It is only due to a predominance of influences that are not only entirely morally indifferent, but indeed — from a human perspective — indescribably cruel, that nature has been capable of constructive action. Specifically, it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved — with torturous inefficiency — from the chaos of natural existence. All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)

>Crucially, any attempt to escape this fatality — or, more realistically, any mere accidental and temporary reprieve from it — leads inexorably to the undoing of its work. Malthusian relaxation is the whole of mercy, and it is the greatest engine of destruction our universe is able to bring about. To the precise extent that we are spared, even for a moment, we degenerate — and this Iron Law applies to every dimension and scale of existence: phylogenetic and ontogenetic, individual, social, and institutional, genomic, cellular, organic, and cultural. There is no machinery extant, or even rigorously imaginable, that can sustain a single iota of attained value outside the forges of Hell.

>What is it that Neoreaction — perhaps I should say The Dark Enlightenment — has to offer the world, if all goes optimally (which, of course, it won’t)? Really, the honest answer to this question is: Eternal Hell. It’s not an easy marketing brief. We could perhaps try: But it could be worse (and almost certainly will be).

Xenosystems: Hell-Baked
http://www.xenosystems.net/hell-baked/

but this is why we probably have to keep going...

>>12631807
take Marx out of it and you change the picture substantially, no?

Is there any truth this aphorism: “analytic philosophy views philosophy as continuous with the hard sciences, continental philosophers view it as continuous with the social sciences”

Is this a good way of explaining the continental-analytic divide?

Describe hell to me