/lit/ - Literature

>>23250430
>Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island, and The Red Pony right now

Plenty of people in mental institutions today would be regarded as saints and prophets in the past.

>>18770679
Something I've noticed when reading medieval and classic texts is that their paced for leisure. Every word should be savored -- they wrote for connoisseurs.

There's a contemporary essayist named George Scialabba and I reached out to him last summer. He writes that writers nowadays have to write for people who don't have the attention span for TV. But fuck that. Reading and thinking should be for the pleasure of understanding, so I recommend choosing really old books -- one of my favorites is Al Razi's "Spiritual Physick" which was written as a short treatise one ethics for some prince.

>>18752013
What concerns me is what comes after the West. This morning I watched Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a beautifully shot and scored documentary on the rock art of Chauvet Cave. For some reason it fucked me up. Here is the childhood of humanity laid bare, untouched for 30000 years and perfectly preserved. It was the time when humans first learned collectively that they existed as something different and, without any introspection of it, began to think higher than the animal life that surrounded them. The paintings do not depict humans, only animals, and their carved human figurines do not have faces, sometimes even without heads. This was the spiritual awakening of mankind's individuality, the first instance of Schiller's maxim "we are because we are" i.e. "I am this but I am not that"

If we conceive of history as the development of human individuality then this was its beginning. Prehistoric cultures spanned continents, but as time elapsed, cultures became smaller, more individuated, and more isolated. To me, Western civilization appears to be the conclusion of this development, the complete dominion of the entire world by one civilization geographically situated in western Europe. And one needs only read Spengler to see that Western civilization is the individualist civilization par excellence.

If the next wave of human civilization is to be a reaction to the West, seeded by the West as you say, then it fills me with a strange sense of foreboding to imagine it. Will it be a new Axial Age? A higher stage of human consciousness? Or will humanity, having reached the peak of abstract thought and individuality in Western civilization, return to primitivism out of hatred for the forms of the West?

>Writing about philosophy
>Add to dictionary
>Add to dictionary
>Add to dictionary
>Add to dictionary

Does anyone here actually work in academia? Has anyone been published? Is anyone respected in the literary field?

>>17721853
You deserve a gf, LF.

Anyone else here a late bloomer? I didn't read a single book between the ages of 12 and 24. I failed school out of total lack of interest and played video games all day. I didn't care about anything, had no goals in life. I didn't know anything about culture apart from loose historical knowledge I picked up from games like Total War and Crusader Kings 2. At 24 I bought a philosophy book on a whim and it changed my life. Nearly 2 years later I'm going to study Philosophy, Politics, & Economics at university. Still a kissless permavirgin though.

>>15763985
You're stuck with the notion that your life should be a specific story, and the fact that it isn't is making you suffer
By understanding your suffering is ultimately self inflicted you will not get rid of it, but you will be able to understand it for what it is: a bunch of nothing

>>15751691
Oakley Hall once said that the business of fiction is to get at truth and not at facts. It's very easy to recite what has happened, it is not so easy to derive universal lessons that hold true for all time from them or even to interpret them properly.

What if mommy is in the track and the mommy milkies are on the other track

>>15668218
Emulating is a great way to create. In fact I'd argue creation is inherently a failed emulation based on failed interpretations and your own experiences.
Many of my poems start with my misinterpretation (or reinvention) of a poem I've read, and they're actually good too

I just want to belong somewhere.

What is the most beautiful passage you've read?

I'll probably never believe in God the Creator. But I do believe in God that exists a priori, whether he exists in reality or not is irrelevant. The idea of an infinite God in which man is just one small part is what drives man in his quest toward perfection. What is this belief called?

>>14344262
It depends on the nature of the determinism. Regular old causal determinism and all its variants (biological, environmental, etc) sucks because counterfactuals still have truth values. However, if it's fatalism I feel fine because then I know there is no way things could have been different

>>14310711
I'm not sure, maybe I think he was in denial that he was tripping. I told him ''don't worry you're just tripping'' so that might have been it. I tried asking him the next day and he said he didn't remember anything. Which I and everyone fucking doubts. So theres no way to know

How do you create your own ideas? All I seem to be able to do is regurgitate the ideas of philosophers I have read, or at best combine them. I want to create something new and original.

>>13979690

Would remind myself every day: "Perfect is the enemy of Good"
Would fortuitiously stumble upon Jared Taylor's 'American Renaissance' publication.
Would go to trade school.
Would learn to read music properly and record some albums in my spare time, even if I didn't intend to distribute them.
Would spend little money on frivolous things until I have a nice house in the country and sizeable long-term investments, only then would I get jiggy with it.
Would not put pussy on a pedestal.
Would be more pratical and less romantic in my notions.
Would lose excess weight before starting to lift.
Would start my own family ASAP.
Would reconcile with my father.

>>13630154
definitely not my diary desu

My dairy desu

>monolectics

>Le Comte de Monte-Cristo
Read it