/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12018704]

wtf this is literally me
>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.12018715]

>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.12019025]

bumping

[fembot No.12019060]

omg I felt the same way after I broke up with my boyfriend

[Anonymous No.12019064]

I fucking hate Pessoa because of this board

[Anonymous No.12019073]

>>12019060
reee

[Anonymous No.12019132]

>>12019025
>"MGTOW is stupid but some of things they say are true"

[Anonymous No.12019139]

>>12018704
pessoa should be this board's patron saint desu

[Anonymous No.12019166]

>>12019025
Fuck. pretty accurate.

[Anonymous No.12019624]

bump

[Anonymous No.12019730]

>>12019025
I don't want to play this bingo

[Anonymous No.12019756]

Yeah op we all had that phase .

[Anonymous No.12019784]

>>12018704
okay but now try to type out how you feel for yourself

[Anonymous No.12019858]

>>12019025
goddamnit

[Anonymous No.12019931]

>>12019025
jesus christ get out of my head

[Anonymous No.12020302]

Bump

[Anonymous No.12020382]

>>12019025
>>12019132
>>12019166
>>12019730
>>12019858
>>12019931
at 23, I am somehow too old for this site

[Anonymous No.12020410]

>>12019025
honestly if this is you, you should probably uninstall. some of these arent that bad like kafka, kierky, or stoner but the rest are toxic memes. get rid of peterson, mgtow, and majorong in stem even though you hate it memes in your life. get rid of that meme music too.

[Anonymous No.12020469]

>>12019025
Do you guys actually fit into these goofy things? I always see people say how they're so accurate. I don't get how. You guys are just joking right?

[Anonymous No.12020475]

>>12020382
I realized that a few months ago. If i had friends I wouldn’t browse at all. My last good recommendation here was Hydrotaphia in May and that was the firsr I’d gotten in well over 6 months. Once you stop learning from or enjoying your time somewhere its time to leave.

[Anonymous No.12020487]

>>12020382
im also 23 and feel like i am too old for here

>>12020410
its all i have

>>12020469
:(

[Anonymous No.12020504]

>>12019784
ok

im sad. i wish i was an anime girl desu~

[Anonymous No.12020517]

>>12019025
do i win?

[Anonymous No.12020525]

>>12020410
this except keep Swans

[Anonymous No.12020527]

>>12020517
not enough green, you look safe to me

[Anonymous No.12020555]

>>12018704
It is a lack of virility.

[Anonymous No.12020562]

>>12020555
Get your BIG, THICK, HARD, JUICY COCK and fuck the world anon.

[Anonymous No.12020726]

>>12020487
>>12020382
>those 23 year old zoomers who think they're old

[Anonymous No.12020893]

>>12018704
On the writer
"Nothing had ever obliged him to do anything. He had spent his childhood alone. He never joined any group. He never pursued a course of study. He never belonged to a crowd. The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon – perhaps, in fact, it’s true for all lives – of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended towards inertia and withdrawal. "

[Anonymous No.12020938]

>>12020893
octavio paz on pessoa
"The humorist who never smiles and makes our blood run cold, the inventor of other poets and self-destroyer, the author of paradoxes clear as water, and like water, dizzying, the mysterious one who doesn't cultivate mystery, mysterious as the moon at noon, the taciturn ghost of the Portuguese midday--who is Pessoa?"

[Anonymous No.12021038]

>>12020893
>Nothing had ever obliged him to do anything. He had spent his childhood alone. He never joined any group. He never pursued a course of study. He never belonged to a crowd.
>tfw

[Anonymous No.12021104]

>>12019025
Cluttered ass bullshit, it really is true that the left can't meme. If this image actually applies to you, kill yourselves.

[Anonymous No.12022305]

>>12020382
22 and I think I have gleaned almost all that there is to this website.
I've learned drawing on /ic/, I've gotten /fit/, I have watched films that nobody else in real life has due to /tv/ and it's absurd expectations and now I am on /lit/ beginning to write and read more.
This board has nothing to offer anymore

[Anonymous No.12022327]

>>12022305
>22 and I think I have gleaned almost all that there is to this website.
Literally me. I just want to fucking move on.

[Anonymous No.12023487]

>>12018704

[Anonymous No.12023497]

>>12022327
that's because you're a dumb frogposter.
I have never posted a frog on 4chan before.

[Anonymous No.12023502]

>>12018704
Absolutely based and blackpilled

[Anonymous No.12023507]

>>12019025
top tier bait image

[Anonymous No.12023513]

I can see why a lot of frequent /lit/ browsers would identify with Pessoa; I find myself relating to the whole 'I am my own witness' bit, and splitting his identity among the various independent heteronyms is fascinating. However, the despair is overpowering at times. I find it difficult to read more than 20-30 pages of tBoD in a sitting, because I have to shake all that dread off if I want to keep up this illusion of happiness.

[Anonymous No.12023517]

>>12019025
delet

[Anonymous No.12023530]

>>12019025
Not like this

[Anonymous No.12023587]

>>12018704
Yes you're the only suicidal 16 year old in this world. Good job, I'm glad you figured that one out bud.

[Anonymous No.12023599]

>>12023497
>>12020382
My, do you reckon that your bait is some masterpiece because you have layered it in a believable way? It's marvelous how easy it is to discern what is and what is not a real post by the tone of the post. Your tone is of a 19 year old who still thinks 'trolling' and 'shitposting' are an amusing way to pass the time. "Please" leave.

[Anonymous No.12024104]

>>12019025
>pursues stem career while despising fellow stems