/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11781222]

Nothing irks me more than the vocabulary of social responsibility. The very word ‘duty’ is unpleasant to me, like an unwanted guest. But the terms ‘civic duty’, ‘solidarity’, ‘humanitarianism’ and others of the same ilk disgust me like rubbish dumped out of a window right on top of me. I’m offended by the implicit assumption that these expressions pertain to me, that I should find them worthwhile and even meaningful. I recently saw in a toy-shop window some objects that reminded me exactly of what these expressions are: make-believe dishes filled with make-believe tidbits for the miniature table of a doll. For the real, sensual, vain and selfish man, the friend of others because he has the gift of speech and the enemy of others because he has the gift of life, what is there to gain from playing with the dolls of hollow and meaningless words? Government is based on two things: restraint and deception. The problem with those glittering expressions is that they neither restrain nor deceive. At most they intoxicate, which is something else again. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a reformer. A reformer is a man who sees the world’s superficial ills and sets out to cure them by aggravating the more basic ills. A doctor tries to bring a sick body into conformity with a normal, healthy body, but we don’t know what’s healthy or sick in the social sphere. I see humanity as merely one of Nature’s latest schools of decorative painting. I don’t distinguish in any fundamental way between a man and a tree, and I naturally prefer whichever is more decorative, whichever interests my thinking eyes. If the tree is more interesting to me than the man, I’m sorrier to see the tree felled than to see the man die. There are departing sunsets that grieve me more than the deaths of children. I keep my own feelings out of everything, in order to be able to feel. I almost reproach myself for writing these sketchy reflections in this moment when a light breeze, rising from the afternoon’s depths, begins to take on colour. In fact it’s not the breeze that takes on colour but the air through which it hesitantly glides. I feel, however, as if the breeze were being coloured, so that’s what I say, for I have to say what I feel, given that I’m I.

[Anonymous No.11781254]

K... Keep Me Posted

[Anonymous No.11781277]

>>11781254
To create in myself a nation with its own politics, parties and revolutions, and to be all of it, everything, to be God in the real pantheism of this people-I, to be the substance and movement of their bodies and their souls, of the very ground they tread and the acts they perform! To be everything, to be them and not them! Ah, this is one of the dreams I’m still far from realizing. And if I realized it, perhaps I would die. I’m not sure why, but it seems one couldn’t live after committing such a great sacrilege against God, after usurping the divine power of being everything. What pleasure it would give me to create a Jesuitry of sensations! There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writings that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in the shadows ..... I’ve written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that has acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul. Why do I sometimes set forth contradictory and irreconcilable methods of dreaming and of learning to dream? Probably because I’m so
used to feeling what’s false as true, and what I dream as vividly as what I see, that I’ve lost the human distinction – false, I believe – between truth and falsehood. For me it’s enough to perceive something clearly, with my eyesight or my hearing or any of my other senses, in order to feel that it’s real. It can even happen that I simultaneously feel two things that can’t logically coexist. No matter. There are people who spend long hours suffering because they can’t be a figure in a painting or in one of the suits from a deck of cards. There are souls who suffer not being able to live today in the Middle Ages as if this were a divine curse. I used to experience this kind of suffering, but
no longer. I’ve moved beyond that level. But it does sadden me that I can’t dream of myself as, say, two kings in different kingdoms that belong to universes with different kinds of space and time. Not to be able to achieve this truly makes me grieve. It smacks to me of going hungry. To visualize the inconceivable in dreams is one of the great triumphs that I, as advanced a dreamer as I am, only rarely attain. To dream, for example, that I’m simultaneously, separately, severally the man and the woman on a stroll that a man and woman are taking along the river. To see myself – at the same time, in the same way, with equal precision and without overlap, being equally but separately integrated into both things – as a conscious ship in a South Sea and a printed page from an old book. How absurd this seems! But everything is absurd, and dreaming least of all.

[Anonymous No.11781335]

>>11781254
Art consists in making others feel what we feel, in freeing them from themselves by offering them our own personality. The true substance of whatever I feel is absolutely incommunicable, and the more profoundly I feel it, the more incommunicable it is. In order to convey to someone else what I feel, I must translate my feelings into his language – saying things, that is, as if they were what I feel, so that he, reading them, will feel exactly what I felt. And since this someone is presumed by art to be not this or that person but everyone (i.e., that person common to all persons), what I must finally do is convert my feelings into a typical human feeling, even if it
means perverting the true nature of what I felt. Abstract things are hard to understand, because they don’t easily command the reader’s attention, so I’ll use a simple example to make my abstractions concrete. Let’s suppose that, for some reason or other (which might be that I’m tired of keeping the books or bored because I have nothing to do), I’m overwhelmed by a vague sadness about life, an inner anxiety that makes me nervous and uneasy. If I try to translate this emotion with close-fitting words, then the closer the fit, the more they’ll represent my own personal feeling, and so the less they’ll communicate it to others. And if there is no communicating it to others, it would be wiser and simpler to feel it without writing it. But let’s suppose that I want to communicate it to others – to make it into art, that is, since art is the communication to others of the identity we feel with them, without which there would be no communication and no need for it. I search for the ordinary human emotion that will have the colouring, spirit and shape of the emotion I’m feeling right now for the inhuman, personal reason of being a weary bookkeeper or a bored Lisboan. And I conclude that the ordinary emotion which in ordinary souls has the same characteristics as my emotion is nostalgia for one’s lost childhood. Now I have the key to the door of my theme. I write and weep about my lost childhood, going into poignant detail about the people and furniture of our old house in the country. I recall the joy of having no rights or responsibilities, of being free because I still didn’t know how to think or feel – and this recollection, if it’s well written and visually effective, will arouse in my reader exactly the same emotion I was feeling, which had nothing to do with childhood. I’ve lied? No, I’ve understood. That lying, except for the childish and spontaneous kind that comes from wanting to be dreaming, is merely the recognition of other people’s real existence and of the need to conform that existence to our own, which cannot be conformed to theirs.

[Anonymous No.11781341]

>>11781335
Lying is simply the soul’s ideal language. Just as we make use of words, which are sounds articulated in an absurd way, to translate into real language the most private and subtle shifts of our thoughts and emotions (which words on their own would never be able to translate), so we make use of lies and fiction to promote understanding among ourselves, something that the truth – personal and incommunicable – could never accomplish. Art lies because it is social. And there are two great forms of art: one that speaks to our deepest soul, the other to our attentive soul. The first is poetry, the second is the novel. The first begins to lie in its very structure; the second in its very intention. One purports to give us the truth through lines that keep strict metres, thus lying against the nature of speech; the other purports to give us the truth by means of a reality that we all know never existed. To feign is to love. Whenever I see a pretty smile or a meaningful gaze, no matter whom the smile or gaze belongs to, I always plumb to the soul of the smiling or gazing face to discover what politician wants to buy our vote or what prostitute wants us to buy her. But the politician that buys us loved at least the act of buying us, even as the prostitute loved being bought by us. Like it or not, we cannot escape universal brotherhood. We all love each other, and the lie is the kiss we exchange.

[Anonymous No.11781385]

>>11781254
one more

No one has yet defined tedium in a language comprehensible to those who have never experienced it. What some people call tedium is merely boredom; others use the term to mean a nagging discomfort; still others consider tedium to be weariness. But while tedium includes weariness, discomfort and boredom, it doesn’t resemble them any more than water resembles the hydrogen and oxygen of which it is composed. If some have a limited and incomplete notion of tedium, a few people give it a meaning that in a certain way transcends it – as when they use the word to signify intellectual and visceral dissatisfaction with the world’s diversity and uncertainty. What makes us yawn, which we call boredom, what makes us fidget and is known as discomfort, and what makes us practically immobile, namely weariness – none of these things is tedium; but neither is tedium the profound sense of life’s emptiness that causes frustrated ambition to surface, disappointed longings to rise up, and the seed to be planted in the soul of the future mystic or saint. Tedium, yes, is boredom with the world, the nagging discomfort of living, the weariness of having lived; tedium is indeed the carnal sensation of the endless emptiness of things. But tedium, even more than all that, is a boredom with other worlds, whether real or imaginary; the discomfort of having to keep living, albeit as someone else, in some other way, in some other world; a weariness not only of yesterday and today but also of tomorrow and of eternity, if such exists, or of nothingness, if that’s what eternity is. It’s not only the emptiness of things and living beings that troubles the soul afflicted by tedium, it’s also the emptiness of something besides things and beings – the emptiness of the very soul that feels this vacuum, that feels itself to be this vacuum, and that within this vacuum is nauseated and repelled by its own self. Tedium is the physical sensation of chaos, a chaos that is everything. The bored, the uncomfortable and the weary feel like prisoners in a narrow cell. Those who abhor the narrowness of life itself feel shackled inside a large cell. But those who suffer tedium feel imprisoned in the worthless freedom of an infinite cell. The walls of the narrow cell may collapse and bury those who are bored, uncomfortable or tired. The shackles may fall and allow the man who abhors life’s puniness to escape, or they may cause him pain as he struggles in vain to remove them and, through the feeling of that pain, revive him without his old abhorrence. But the walls of the infinite cell cannot crumble and bury us, because they don’t exist; nor can we be revived by the pain of shackles no one has put on us.

[Anonymous No.11781392]

>>11781222
>mfw gringos have to read Pessoa in english

[Anonymous No.11781394]

>>11781385
This is what I feel before the placid beauty of this eternally dying afternoon. I look at the lofty, clear sky where I see fuzzy, pinkish shapes like the shadows of clouds, an impalpable soft down of a winged and far-away life. I look below me at the river, whose ever-so-slightly shimmering water is of a blue that seems to mirror a deeper sky. I raise my eyes back to the sky, where the coloured fuzziness that shredlessly unravels in the invisible air is now tinged by a frigid shade of dull white, as if something in the higher, more rarefied sphere of things had its own material tedium, an impossibility of being what it is, an imponderable body of anguish and desolation. But what’s in the lofty air besides the lofty air, which is nothing? What’s in the sky besides a colour that’s not its own? What’s in these tatters that aren’t even of clouds (and whose very existence I doubt) besides a few glimmers of materially arriving rays from an already resigned sun? What’s in all this besides myself? Ah, but that, and that alone, is tedium. In all of this – the sky, the earth, the world – there is nothing at all but me!

[Anonymous No.11781440]

I’ve reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.

[Anonymous No.11781460]

>>11781392
So are you literally Portuguese, or is are there Spanish translations of Pessoa? I don't wanna study a meme language just to read my favorite writer.

[Anonymous No.11781480]

>>11781392
>yfw I'm fluent in Portuguese but choose to read Pessoa in English because I prefer his work translated

[Anonymous No.11781491]

>>11781460
Even better, I'm brazilian.
>>11781480
Mata-te, anônimo.

[Anonymous No.11781547]

>owe everything you are and have to society
>lol I'm too good for it, k?

[Anonymous No.11781590]

>>11781547
?

[Anonymous No.11781699]

bump

[Anonymous No.11781821]

>reads Bergson once

[Anonymous No.11781843]

>>11781491
>brazilian
Favela posters are not allowed here

[Anonymous No.11781855]

>>11781547
>owe everything you are and have to society

[Anonymous No.11781907]

There’s something very interesting about civics and selfishness, and we get to ride the crest of it. Here in the US, we expect government and law to be our conscience. Our superego, you could say. It has something to do with liberal individualism, and something to do with capitalism, but I don’t understand much of the theoretical aspect—what I see is what I live in. Americans are in a way crazy. We infantilize ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens—parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilities. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality.

[Anonymous No.11782214]

I have to read him asap

[Anonymous No.11782488]

>>11782214
Seriously, do it. Start with the Zenith translation.

[Anonymous No.11782726]

To join in or collaborate or act with others is a metaphysically morbid impulse. The soul conferred on the individual shouldn’t be lent out to its relations with others. The divine fact of existing shouldn’t be surrendered to the satanic fact of coexisting. When I act with others, there’s at least one thing I lose – acting alone. When I participate, although it seems that I’m expanding, I’m limiting myself. To associate is to die. Only my consciousness of myself is real for me; other people are hazy phenomena in this consciousness, and it would be morbid to attribute very much reality to them. Children, who want at all costs to have their way, are closest to God, for they want to exist. As adults our life is reduced to giving alms to others and receiving them in return. We squander our personalities in orgies of coexistence. Every spoken word double-crosses us. The only tolerable form of communication is the written word, since it isn’t a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars. To explain is to disbelieve. Every philosophy is a diplomacy dressed up as eternity..... Like diplomacy, it has no real substance, existing not in its own right but completely and utterly on behalf of some objective. The only noble destiny for a writer who publishes is to be denied a celebrity he deserves. But the truly noble destiny belongs to the writer who doesn’t publish. Not who doesn’t write, for then he wouldn’t be a writer. I mean the writer in whose nature it is to write, but whose spiritual temperament prevents him from showing what he writes. To write is to objectify dreams, to create an outer world as a material reward [?] of our nature as creators. To publish is to give this outer world to others; but what for, if the outer world common to us and to them is the ‘real’ outer world, the one made of visible and tangible matter? What do others have to do with the universe that’s in me?

[Anonymous No.11782745]

>>11781222
my diary desu

[Anonymous No.11783298]

>>11781547
imagine being this spooked

[Anonymous No.11783352]

>>11781222
>I keep my own feelings out if everything, in order to be able to feel

[Anonymous No.11783416]

>>11781222
>>11781277
>>11781335
>>11781341
>>11781385
Alert and amphetaminepilled

[Anonymous No.11783757]

note how bourgois intellectuals only care about economic equality not social equality (ie mental health / happiness / social capital / life outcomes)

[Anonymous No.11783773]

>>11781254
you forgot pic related anon!

[Anonymous No.11783802]

>>11783757
But how do you quantify these things?

[Anonymous No.11783976]

bump