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/lit/ - Literature

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10689185 No.10689185 [Reply] [Original]

Why are most literary figures miserable with chaotic or, in my opinion, shitty lives? Hemingway had 4 divorces and shot himself. Tolstoy turned into a lunatic. You get the picture.

>> No.10689199

>>10689185
what kind of lunatic?

>> No.10689200

>>10689185
In order to be motivated to write you need to have some serious obsessional hatred of your life. Happy functional people just slide softly into the grave, it takes the tormented and horrified to inflict us with their thoughts

>> No.10689212

>>10689185
In order to write you need to have some deep psychological wound that you're unconsciously trying to heal.

>> No.10689228

>>10689185
>provides two examples

>> No.10689233

Gotta be Mishima.

>Gay in Japan, despite being right-wing
>Failed a coup
>Committed literal seppuku

>> No.10689239

what can I say ... pain makes for captivating literature, I guess. It grabs the readers feelings far better than any intelectual pretext ever could.

>> No.10689247

>>10689239
Cioran was right, writing and reading is rooted in despair

>> No.10689266

>>10689185
>>10689185
Tolstoy was not a lunatic, instead, he was a latent homosexual who was in denial all his life. That's why he had problems with his wife (he was forced to sleep with women all his life) and hated all of his major works (e.g. War & Peace). It also explains his extreme misogyny and religious fanaticism. (Anna Karenina represents an idea that if the woman leaves her husband she becomes a whore). Just read his work "What is art?" - this single piece proves that this old buffer was a complete brainlet and had no understanding of beauty w h a t s o e v e r...

>> No.10689288

>>10689266
>I'm a better writer than tolstoy

>> No.10689301

>>10689288
nothing brings out self-righteousness quite like anonymity

>> No.10689319

>>10689301
Thats not true at all, its actually the opposite

>> No.10689336

>>10689288
By no means. I simply suggest that you need to be critical about what you read due to the fact that all fiction one way or another is a product of its time and is generally a weak tool to understand the human condition. This maybe captures the idea that, whereas personal opinions may differ over the relative merits of the novels of Tolstoy, there is no room for such variation of opinions on the relative merits of Galileo's and Einstein's theories of relativity. Personally, I am not interested in the interceptive experience of some weirdo who lived in the 19th century Russia...

>> No.10689340

>>10689336
Oh my God fuck off, no one wants to read this shit

>> No.10689353

>>10689228
Weininger, suicide, intense delusions
Coleridge, mental instability
Samuel Johnson, melancholia-dyspepsia, heard voices, suffered from mental confusion
Blake, went mad
Lincoln, suicidal, melancholic
Sherman, mental breakdown
Scott Fitzgerald, mental instability, total breakdown later in life
Bunyan- intense religious experiences, dream visions
Cromwell- religious hallucination
Milton- extremely vivid inspired religious dreams
Swift- intense temperamental problems,
Orson Welles- suicidal thoughts, described his inner life as "an abyss"
Nietzsche- visual hallucinations on closing his eyes, wept on imbibing alcohol, extreme dyspepsia
Carlyle- melancholic dyspepsia
Melville- chased his wife with a kitchen knife
Tolstoy- intensely suicidal, had to be monitored, intense depression and desperate religious conversion
Carlyle- dyspepsia-melancholia
HL Mencken- "superrational atheist" was in reality severely anxious and superstitious, suffered some melancholic dyspepsia
Joyce- tactile and olfactory hallucination, alcoholism
Flaubert- extreme pessimism and severe anxiety, called himself afraid of life, pederast
Jonathan Edwards- powerful religious swoons
Oscar Wilde- mentally unstable, pederast
Edgar Allan Poe- semimad lovesickness

>> No.10689388

>>10689353
Forgot
Nabokov, uncontrollable temper, auditory hallucinations, synesthesia
Tennyson, intermittent madness
Tasso, locked away in an insane asylum
Pound, locked away in an insane asylum

>> No.10689419

Because in the end almost everyone leads chaotic and shitty lives.

>> No.10689436

>>10689419
lol that is nowhere near true, like not even a bit
Most people are fucking algae, they just float through life and die barely even thinking

>> No.10689443

>>10689353
>Cromwell- religious hallucination

Delete this

>> No.10689448

If I can expand on what it's already been rightly said in this thread: making art is by itself a cathartic process. You normally just dont do it if there is some sort of demon in you that you need to exorcize.

Most great literature comes from a desire to bridge oneself with a world percieved distant

>> No.10689456

>>10689448
*isnt

>> No.10689473

>>10689185
Guy de Maupassant

>> No.10689503

>>10689473
How did you know you faggot? I was just thinking about him a few minutes ago. His name irritates me so much that I wonder it I have autism. Not his shit, just the way his name sounds. OLOLOLOLEELLELELWOWOOWO

>> No.10689508

>>10689266
He hated his major works because he was a fag?

>> No.10689517

>>10689353
Poe married his fucking 13 yo cousin!

>> No.10689519

>>10689503
Godomoposo

>> No.10689533

>>10689266
> he was a latent homosexual who was in denial all his life
this is true... surprising more people haven't caught onto this

>> No.10689535

>>10689519
LALALALALA SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP

>> No.10689569

>>10689185
"Ordinary New People couldn’t
love anything as he loves me. That is blindly. Absolutely. Like Dante and Beatrice.
He enjoys being hopelessly in love with me. I expect Dante was the same. Mooning
around knowing it was all quite hopeless and getting lots of good creative material from
the experience. "

>> No.10689592

normies don't understand *real* emotion, imagination or conviction

>> No.10689598

>>10689228
David Foster Wallace - Addicted to smoking and Seinfeld

>> No.10689614

>>10689436
You can barely think and still lead a shitty and chaotic life.
The thing is that no one will know about the problems of such people in that case because they arent famous, they dont write about their hardships or they keep those things silent for whatever reason.

>> No.10689633

>>10689614
Still don't agree, most people grow up and live in the same 50 mile area their entire lives with the same friends and the same shallow relationship partaking in the same interests and fandoms until the end.
Yeah sure their lives are pathetic and mediocre but they lack any semblence of the emotional intensity and passions of the great writers. There's a nuanced difference between chaos, as is in a certain order being up-ended and just pointless noise

>> No.10689650

>>10689633
>Yeah sure their lives are pathetic and mediocre
By whose metric?

>> No.10689666

>>10689650
By mine dickwad

>> No.10689673

>>10689666
Your metric sucks.

>> No.10689688

>>10689673
Not by my metric

>> No.10689719

>>10689185
In my opinion, there are at least 3 plausible explanations:
1) If you buy all this psychology bullshit, you can say that creativity correlates with neuroticism, therefore, people who are extremely talented are also estimated to be more neurotic (on average). This often leads to chaotic and shitty lives.
2) A writer is ultimately an observer. Hence, the environment in which (s)he functions is always of extreme importance because the atmosphere of the age is directly reflected in the writings. And human history is full of misery and violence ( e.g. most of the American writers in the 20th century had severe problems with alcohol).
3) A lot of people write because it is a very powerful form of auto-therapy (think about Rowling and the fear of death, or Peterson's self-authoring program). Therefore, individuals who are involved in the writing endeavor initially have issues (e.g. your diary desu).

>> No.10690277

>>10689185
He's huge.

I thought the other guy might be a manlet but look at the chairs.

>> No.10690283
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10690283

>>10690277
They don't call him the Minotaur of Milwaukee for nothing

>> No.10690287

A lot of regular people have chaotic private lives that we don't hear about. We know about every famous literary figure's personal foibles because they are famous.

>> No.10690292

>>10690283
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXPLEsNhVSk&t=

>> No.10690328

>>10689266
> using works of art as a means to psychoanalyze the artist and make wild speculations about his personal life in an effort to posthumously discredit the life and work of a man you’ve never met

God I hate psychology. It reeks of its Jewish nature.

>> No.10690347

>>10690292
He looks actually terrifying to be around, thank God he's one of the good guys

>> No.10690348

>>10689233
Homosexuality didnt have the same kind of taboo in Japan, historically. There's no contradiction between Japanese right wing thought, traditionally, and homosexuality. Even if the modern right wing did not feel the same way.

>> No.10690394

>>10690283
>>10690292
>it's not shopped

he could crush those lads' skulls with his hands

>> No.10690454

>>10689388
>Pound, locked away in an insane asylum
That was entirely political though

>> No.10690489

>>10690283
absolute unit

>> No.10690541

>>10690489
From Manchester?
Only heard lower class and lower-middle class Mancunians use this phrase.

>> No.10690584

>>10689598
Also had issues with alcohol and pot at various points in his life.

There was also the depression and suicide, his bad relationships with women, and his inability to "get a start" in his 20's. There was some other stuff at play too, I think.

>> No.10690601
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10690601

>>10690283
to live in a time of giant hegelians is truly wonderful

>> No.10691421

>you will never be a big guy like Gregory

>> No.10691541

How tall is he?

>> No.10691549

>>10689185
People are miserable in general

>> No.10691557

>>10689200
>>10689212
Fuck

>> No.10691562
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10691562

>> No.10691569

>>10689233
Mishima wasn't gay. Homosexuality isn't a label to be through around.

>> No.10691588

Most people are miserable with chaotic or, in your opinion, shitty lives. Although in writers and artists it may be more pronounced because writers often have a fierier and more emotional, strange nature. It's precisely their uniqueness and extremely emotional nature that has allowed them to create works effective and memorable enough that we remember them as geniuses and great writers. Although, on the other hand, you could view this not as a good but rather as disease. An aesthetic and beautiful mental disease, but still a disease.

>> No.10691793

>>10689336
>apple falls on head
>gravity explains the human condition

>time moves slower as we speed up
>black holes explain the human condition

t. Christopher Nolan

>> No.10691814

>>10690283
He's a big guy.

>> No.10691819

>>10691569
He's on the ceiling of San Fran's Gay and Lesbian center....

>> No.10691833

>>10691819
So?

>> No.10691872

>>10691833
They don't put Hereros on the ceilings of gay centers generally

He had a gay lover and attended gay bars

>> No.10692230

>>10689336
And no one's interested in your shitty opinions.

>> No.10693106

>>10689598
lol that's a pretty funny thing

>> No.10694017

>>10689592
So apparently *real* emotion, imagination and conviction just lead to suffering? Wtf I wanna be a normie now

>> No.10694778

>>10689185
He's a big guy