/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.15217082]

I'm not sure how many of you are aware of this, but the practice of reading silently (i.e. looking at a text and reading the words without engagement of the lips, tongue, or voice) is a perversion. After studying the history and nature of this silent reading, it becomes astonishingly clear that the practice is the insidious seed of the suffering associated with our technological society. Thus I posit that silent reading, not agriculture or the industrial revolution, and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Silent reading takes as its end and highest state of realization an identity with the reader's mind and the text. This necessitates sundering the reader from a streamlined, spontaneous yet responsive experience of the world. What silent reading substitutes for this is not a series of events as such but what is essentially reader's narcissistic experience of itself as a series of word-pictures. To borrow Schopenhauer's formulation, the subject is removed from struggling to carry out the demands of the Will, and instead perceives the Will as an object, and is thus relieved from pain.

What Schopenhauer was not able to realize is that carrying out the demands of the Will becomes painful only when the possibility of this estrangement, in the form of aesthetic contemplation (specifically its highest form, silent reading) of the Will is indulged at all. Without the creation of this second sphere of human activity in silent reading, human beings would enjoy in their ordinary conscious experience the tranquility and experience of the world as something whole that Schopenhauer sees as belonging to the second sphere of aesthetic contemplation. This is the meaning of the Book of Genesis and Pandora's Box. This is consistent with Schopenhauer's philosophy, and the fact that he was not able to conduct this knight's move in his thought speaks to the ineluctably of the problem. Heidegger came close when he identified the questioning of Being in the presocratics, but not close enough. The shift from reading out loud to silent reading, and the shift of our conception of Being that followed, is the missing part of his Existential Analytic.

How do you heal? Read such that your reading becomes an activity with presence and moment in the world. Have someone read to you. Try your best to memorize what they read and repeat it back to them. I've been engaged with this program for the past 4 months with my girlfriend, and I have memorized the standard Sanskrit repertoire and most significant English poetry from Chaucer to Milton. It is no coincidence that Milton, a blind man, was the last English author to have a sense of the primacy of vocal engagement in writing. Read such that you do not see the text at all but, the words exist in their one short moment of verbalization henceforth in your memory. Being raised in a world of mental onanism, of sick secretiveness and the worship of noxious interiority wounds us, but one can heal.

[Anonymous No.15217107]

Counterpoint: If I read your post out loud any passing person will think I'm retarded

[Anonymous No.15217125]

[Anonymous No.15218273]

[Anonymous No.15218311]

claw dapussy

[Anonymous No.15218313]

>>15217082
>t. NPC incapable of inner speech

[Anonymous No.15218415]

>>15217082
This is the most pseudo intellectual post I've ever read.

[Anonymous No.15218521]

>>15218311
Sir Gay Prokockiev

[Anonymous No.15218558]

wtf I want to give birth to many children several of whom die before reaching adolescence now