/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11819984]

this book has infected me. i regret reading this.

[Anonymous No.11819995]

>>11819984
This is what you get for taking /lit/'s recs about some sadfag cuck. You should kys now and cleanse the world a little .

[Anonymous No.11820078]

>>11819984
Infected you with what?

[Anonymous No.11820675]

>>11819984
What's it about?

[Anonymous No.11820696]

>>11820675
lucid and depressing aphoristic writings

[Anonymous No.11820708]

>>11820696
>>11820675
by a made up character. it is basically the "my diary desu"

[Anonymous No.11820828]

>>11820696
Reallly? Would you say it's worth the read?

[Anonymous No.11820891]

>>11820828
you tell me

>To read is to dream, guided by someone else’s hand. To read carelessly and distractedly is to let go of that hand. To be only superficially learned is the best way to read well and be profound. How shoddy and contemptible life is! Note that, for it to be shoddy and contemptible, all it takes is you not wanting it, it being given to you anyway, and nothing depending on your will or even on the illusion of your will. To die is to become completely other. That's why suicide is a cowardice; it's to surrender ourselves completely to life.

>My attempt to say at least who I am, to record like a machine of nerves the slightest impressions of my subjective and ultra-sensitive life - this was all emptied like a bucket that got knocked over, and it poured across the ground like the water of everything. I fashioned myself out of false colors, and the result is an attic made out to be an empire.

>I’ve always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I’m not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.

>To organize life in such a way that it becomes a mystery to others, that those who are closest to us will only be closer to not knowing us. That is how I’ve shaped my life, almost without thinking about it, but I did it with so much instinctive art that even to myself I’ve become a not entirely clear and definite individual.

>I'm handed faith like a sealed package on a strange-looking platter and am expected to accept it without opening it. I'm handed science, like a knife on a plate, to cut the folios of a book whose pages are blank. I'm handed doubt, like dust inside a box--but why give me a box if all it contains is dust?

>I dreamily and digestively drowse. I have time, between synaesthesias. And it's extraordinary to think that, if I were asked right now what I want for this short life, I could think nothing better than these long slow minutes, this absence of thought and emotion, of action and almost o sensation itself, this inner sunset of dissipated desire. And then it occurs to me, almost without thinking, that most if not all people live like this, with greater or lesser consciousness, moving forward or standing still, but still with the very same indifference towards ultimate aims, the same renunciation of their personal goals, the same watered-down life.

[Anonymous No.11820919]

>>11820828
some people here say it was a slog but i enjoyed it. there are some interesting ideas in it.

"The superior man differs from the inferior man and his animal brothers by the simple trait of irony. Irony is the first sign that our consciousness has become conscious, and it passes through two stages: the one represented by Socrates, when he says, ‘All I know is that I know nothing,’ and the other represented by Sanches,* when he says, ‘I don’t even know if I know nothing.’ In the first stage we dogmatically doubt ourselves, and every superior man arrives there. In the second stage we come to doubt not only ourselves but also our own doubt, and few men have reached that point in the already so long yet short span of time that the human race has beheld the sun and night over the earth’s variegated surface. To know oneself is to err, and the oracle that said ‘Know thyself’ proposed a task more difficult than the labours of Hercules and a riddle murkier than the Sphinx’s. To consciously not know ourselves – that’s the way! And to conscientiously not know ourselves is the active task of irony. I know nothing greater, nor more worthy of the truly great man, than the patient and expressive analysis of the ways in which we don’t know ourselves, the conscious recording of the unconsciousness of our conscious states, the metaphysics of autonomous shadows, the poetry of the twilight of disillusion. But something always eludes us, some analysis or other always gets muddled, and the truth – even if false – is always beyond the next corner. And this is what tires us even more than life (when life tires us) and more than the knowledge and contemplation of life (which always tire us). I stand up from the chair where, propped distractedly against the table, I’ve entertained myself with the narration of these strange impressions. I stand up, propping my body on itself, and walk to the window, higher than the surrounding rooftops, and I watch the city going to sleep in a slow beginning of silence. The large and whitely white moon sadly clarifies the terraced differences in the buildings opposite. The moonlight seems to illuminate icily all the world’s mystery. It seems to reveal everything, and everything is shadows with admixtures of faint light, false and unevenly absurd gaps, inconsistencies of the visible. There’s no breeze, and the mystery seems to loom larger. I feel queasy in my abstract thought. I’ll never write a page that sheds light on me or that sheds light on anything. A wispy cloud hovers hazily over the moon, like a coverture. I’m ignorant, like these rooftops. I’ve failed, like all of nature.

[Anonymous No.11821681]

>>11820919
>>11820891
I'll give it a shot then.

[Anonymous No.11821697]

>>11820078
probably disquiet

[Anonymous No.11821704]

>>11820891
>To die is to become completely other.
this one actually made me think

[Anonymous No.11821707]

>>11820891
>To be understood is to prostitute oneself.
This one is just dumb though. No basis at all, and any healthy community depends on at least some mutual understanding.

[Anonymous No.11821713]

>>11820891
in general he sounds like a very, very sad boi

[Anonymous No.11821726]

>>11821707
you might understand that quote and him better of you got read up what heteronyms are and read his wiki page. this book is written by one of his heteronyms.

[Anonymous No.11821755]

>>11821726
>To be only superficially learned is the best way to read well and be profound
He says otherwise right here tho nigga

[Anonymous No.11821776]

>>11821755
that is his heteronym.bernardo soares
also
>To have opinions is to sell out to yourself. To have no opinion is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.
sear,h up negative capability as well pessoa has a lot of that

[Anonymous No.11821786]

>>11821755
also he contradicts himself constantly in the book don't take in every word as it being really his. it is a beautiful book.

[Anonymous No.11821800]

>>11819984
>this book has infected me. i regret reading this.
i read some lines posted here yesterday and immediately said FUCK that

all of y'all #metoo need to actually go outside and live up to the ideals that haunt your waking masochistic daydream.

[Anonymous No.11821805]

>>11820919
you got me, now I'm gonna read it

[Anonymous No.11821811]

>>11820919
>Sanches,*
who the fuck is this
>‘I don’t even know if I know nothing
fucckckkkkk

[Anonymous No.11822108]

>>11821811
>who the fuck is this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Sanches
"forerunner of descartes"

[Anonymous No.11822254]

>>11820891
>>11820919
*snap*

[Anonymous No.11823514]

>>11822254
dead meme

[Anonymous No.11823627]

>>11820919
unironically epic

[Anonymous No.11825097]

>>11819984
You sound like a bitch, bitch

[Anonymous No.11825130]

>>11825097