/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11990867]

this is the greatest book ive ever read and everything ive read before does not compare

[Anonymous No.11990872]

>>11990867
quiet

[Anonymous No.11990918]

it's not even a book

[Anonymous No.11990962]

Sell me on this book,anon.

[Anonymous No.11990976]

>>11990962
I’ve witnessed, incognito, the gradual collapse of my life, the slow foundering of all that I wanted to be. I can say, with a truth that needs no flowers to show it’s dead, that there’s nothing I’ve wanted – and nothing in which I’ve placed, even for a moment, the dream of only that moment – that hasn’t disintegrated below my windows like a clod of dirt that resembled stone until it fell from a flowerpot on a high balcony. It would even seem that Fate has always tried to make me love or want things just so that it could show me, on the very next day, that I didn’t have and could never have them.

But as an ironic spectator of myself, I’ve never lost interest in seeing what life brings. And since I now know beforehand that every vague hope will end in disillusion, I have the special delight of already enjoying the disillusion with the hope, like the bitter with the sweet that makes the sweet sweeter by way of contrast. I’m a sullen strategist who, having never won a battle, has learned to derive pleasure from mapping out the details of his inevitable retreat on the eve of each new engagement.

My destiny, which has pursued me like a malevolent creature, is to be able to desire only what I know I’ll never get. If I see the nubile figure of a girl in the street and imagine for the slightest moment, however nonchalantly, what it would be like if she were mine, it’s a dead certainty that ten steps past my dream she’ll meet the man who’s obviously her husband or lover. A romantic would make a tragedy out of this; a stranger to the situation would see it as a comedy; I, however, mix the two things, since I’m romantic in myself and a stranger to myself, and I turn the page to yet another irony.

Some say that without hope life is impossible, others that with hope it’s empty. For me, since I’ve stopped hoping or not hoping, life is simply an external picture that includes me and that I look at, like a show without a plot, made only to please the eyes – an incoherent dance, a rustling of leaves in the wind, clouds in which the sunlight changes colour, ancient streets that wind every which way around the city.

I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write. I unroll myself in sentences and paragraphs, I punctuate myself. In my arranging and rearranging of images I’m like a child using newspaper to dress up as a king, and in the way I create rhythm with a series of words I’m like a lunatic adorning my hair with dried flowers that are still alive in my dreams. And above all I’m calm, like a rag doll that has become conscious of itself and occasionally shakes its head to make the tiny bell on top of its pointed cap produce a sound, the jingling life of a dead man, a feeble notice to Fate.

[Anonymous No.11990980]

>>11990976
But how often, in the middle of this peaceful dissatisfaction, my conscious emotion is slowly filled with a feeling of emptiness and tedium for thinking this way! How often I feel, as if hearing a voice behind intermittent sounds, that I myself am the underlying bitterness of this life so alien to human life – a life in which nothing happens except in its self-awareness! How often, waking up for a moment from this exile that’s me, I get a glimpse of how much better it would be to be a complete nobody, the happy man who at least has real bitterness, the contented man who feels fatigue instead of tedium, who suffers instead of imagining he suffers, who kills himself, yes, instead of watching himself die!

I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads. Whatever I feel is felt (against my will) so that I can write that I felt it. Whatever I think is promptly put into words, mixed with images that undo it, cast into rhythms that are something else altogether.

From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I. I plumbed myself and dropped the plumb; I spend my life wondering if I’m deep or not, with no remaining plumb except my gaze that shows me – blackly vivid in the mirror at the bottom of the well – my own face that observes me observing it.

I’m like a playing card belonging to an old and unrecognizable suit – the sole survivor of a lost deck. I have no meaning, I don’t know my worth, there’s nothing I can compare myself with to discover what I am, and to make such a discovery would be of no use to anyone. And so, describing myself in image after image – not without truth, but with lies mixed in – I end up more in the images than in me, stating myself until I no longer exist, writing with my soul for ink, useful for nothing except writing. But the reaction ceases, and again I resign myself. I go back to whom I am, even if it’s nothing. And a hint of tears that weren’t cried makes my stiff eyes burn; a hint of anguish that wasn’t felt gets caught in my dry throat. But I don’t even know what I would have cried over, if I’d cried, nor why it is that I didn’t cry over it. The fiction follows me, like my shadow. And what I want is to sleep.

[Anonymous No.11991001]

>>11990867
Reminder: Fuck Penguin

[Anonymous No.11991030]

Anyone got link to pdf ?

libgen gives either 2002 edition or smth "epub" which i neither know or wanna know what it is.

p.s. why did 4chan started requiring verification every post?

[Anonymous No.11991135]

>>11990976
>>11990980
Thanks for taking your time to write this,anon.On my list now.

[Anonymous No.11991153]

>>11991135
I copypastad it

[Anonymous No.11991186]

>>11991153
KEK,thanks anyway brah.

[Anonymous No.11991203]

>>11991030
nigger

[Anonymous No.11991310]

>>11990867
Protip: best edition is Jerónimo Pizarro Edition.

[Anonymous No.11991321]

>>11990867
>disjointed nihilistic thoughts: the book
No thank you

[Anonymous No.11991373]

>>11991310
This is one of the few times I thank God for knowing spanish.

[Anonymous No.11991384]

I just started it, and I'm not even 50 pages in, and I'm enjoying it. However, I think >>11991321 is right.. If I was in a bad place, this wouldn't be a healthy read.

[Anonymous No.11992189]

Bump

[Anonymous No.11992224]

>>11990980
>And what I want is to sleep.

[Anonymous No.11992957]

>>11992224
So he can dream faggot. Read the book instead of appropriating quotes to fit your faggoty suicidal aspirations.

[Anonymous No.11993046]

>>11991030
did you just get out of prison

[Anonymous No.11993061]

>“I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”

/ourguy/

[Anonymous No.11993301]

Thanks for reminding me, just bought it.

[Anonymous No.11993363]

>>11990980
despair's a sin

[Anonymous No.11994110]

>>11993061
>tfw