Becoming a beacon of light in ugliness

[Anonymous No.16506432]

I had this friend. He passed away due to a drunk driver. He was 29. Whenever he entered a room, it became better. I got to know him when we were both kids, we were pretty much best friends but then studied at different uni's and got different jobs and friends.
The first few years I knew him, he was gaming all the time (that's how we became friends, we both played Wolfenstein Enemy Territory) and was basically your average male, not very good looking, not very well taken care of, but a good, decent person.
A few years later there was more than a year inbetween our meetings, and this was when we were at different universities. I was shocked when I saw him. He had gotten ripped, he wore clothes that fit, he lost all excess weight, his hair was looking great. He looked great I was so happy for him. He told me he read loads of books by several philosophers, names I have now all forgotten. That was a a while ago. A few months after that he found a girl, a true beauty, and they married. Unfortunately he passed not long after that.
I remember him telling me how reactionary he became, he said he was striving to become a light in an ugly world. I was very impressed by how 'philosophical' the things he said were. He was going to send me a reading list he used but unfortunately he never got to that.
Now I come to you /lit/ to please help me out. I'm looking to follow the path of my passed bro, and I realize many of you will think 'him being it should be enough to inspire you' but don't underestimate how much this rational modernist world has gotten to me. I want to finally get it right and actually change my mind based on a philisophical foundation.
I'm looking for books that instill a sense of purpose in you to become better, to strive for beauty. Books on the meaning and essence of beauty, keeping in mind that I am pretty agnostic and 'modern' in that I can't immediately see beauty as something divine or something like that.

I hope at least one of you understands what I mean. It is my goal to become that which my friend was, a beacon of light in an ugly world.
Thank you

[Anonymous No.16506476]

I have an anecdote about hiring processes. I was complaining that every time I would go to a job interview, the hiring manager(s) would attack me with their satanism. The witchcraft of the hiring managers' satanism upon my face was plain to feel in a dozen or so separate corporate interviews, the splotchy blackness of their wickedness would be present in the extreme peripheries of my vision, and I became quite familiar with the zonked-out feeling of complete disinterest as they would push my attention down with their satanism. I speculated that this was the KSW protocol by which satanic hiring managers in the employ of the scientologists select their fellow satanists for employment opportunities: opportunities that ostensibly have nothing to do with satanic practices, such as being a coder.

After I had made some long post about the oddly satanic, oddly ubiquitous interview screening one day, I went to the store. The heckler in Walmart heckled me over the divider between the aisles. He said, "Nah, bruh! We tryina see if you ALIIIIIVE!" I pointed out that obviously that was not a good way to determine evidence of life because I am alive and all of those tests came back showing that I a not alive but I believe my point was lost on him. Indeed, the most satanic of all the interviews was in the IT department for Northside Hospital in Atlanta. The people in the hospital ought to know that checking the pulse is a much better way to determine life than to say my reaction to their satanism, and not my heartbeat, is what determines whether or not I am alive. In fact, these people must be fucking braindead to think my reaction to their satanism tells them anything more than whether or not I give a fuck about satanism. (I don't, btw.) All of them must be braindead, not just the ones at the hospital.

[Anonymous No.16506547]

Bronze Age Mindset by Bronze Age Pervert
Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler
Ride the Tiger and Revolt Against The Modern World by Evola
Various works of Friedrich Nietzsche
Sorry for your loss by the way

[Anonymous No.16506550]

I've no clue what the above anon is talking about.

Start with Sir Roger Scruton. Fantastic person who wrote a lot about Beauty and has a documentary called Why Beauty Matters which is on YouTube.

[Anonymous No.16506564]

>>16506550 refers to >>16506476

question for >>16506547
how does Evola in those works talk about beauty? I can't remember reading a lot about that in those but it's been decades since I've read them. Question also goes for Spengler

sorry for your loss OP

[Anonymous No.16506599]

>>16506432
Could I get some Parmesan with my pasta?

[Anonymous No.16506692]

>>16506432
Beautiful post (I mean it), sorry for your loss and hopefully someone here will be able to help

[Anonymous No.16506765]

>>16506692
Thank you! I hope for the same.

[Anonymous No.16506901]

>>16506547
Thanks for these! I already have BAP I will get the others.

[Anonymous No.16506930]

>>16506901
You should also read the Gospels to stay grounded and humble. Many of those works, especially Neetzsche, support egoism, elitism and such which while to a certain degree can be healthy, you shouldnt exaggerate.

[Anonymous No.16506940]

Bumping this thread for OPs friend.

[Anonymous No.16507049]

>>16506930
Do you mean that in a way that elitism is a prerequisite for striving to be 'beauty in ugliness'? Does it become then a way of becoming better than everyone else, or rather becoming a better version of who you were before?

[Anonymous No.16507583]

>>16506432
Evola's major works

[Anonymous No.16507605]

>>16506476
is this you?

[Anonymous No.16507701]

>>16506432
The Symposium
When it gets to Socrates rehearsing Diotima’s speech—that through love/Eros you might, just might catch a glimpse of something like “truth” or “beauty,” that through loving another you might find that one window into it all, the window that redeems everything, that mends a broken life, that justifies your existence as a stranger in need of care in this world—when i got to this part i could not help but break down and cry.
Certainly different people have different reactions to texts, and i do not pretend that there is any guarantee or anything you’ll love it. But i do hope you find in it all that i did; i hope you find outside it even more.

[Anonymous No.16507734]

Kazantzakis - Saviors of God
Teachings of Sylvanus

[Anonymous No.16507744]

The Centurion Method

[Anonymous No.16507750]

Condolences, OP.

I recommend Evola unironically. But not a meme reading of him like the typical zoomer has. He was trying to do what your friend was trying to do, in a way that would establish a paradigm and allow others to do it, and give strength to those who were already trying (whether they realised it or not). Start with his Points of Orientation https://www.gornahoor.net/?p=4428 (this is just the first one, keep clicking along). Then read enough shorter essays like those in the Handbook for Youth to see if you want to read his longer books.

This will at least give you a sense. Evola wants to give you the ability to find and cultivate your own backbone, until it is strong enough to make your whole being into a backbone that orients the "body" of your life around you, and then your life will become a backbone for others, and a beacon to others to do the same thing for themselves, like your friend did for you. When enough men like this get together they will create an unspoken order and understanding between one another, and this can then become the foundation for a great culture, a culture that can withstand the disintegrating effects of modernity.

Coming together and disintegrating are both natural forces. Cultures wax and wane and undergo cataclysms. What isn't natural is that the disintegrating forces, intentional or not, have become completely dominant. At every level they are discouraging and torturing people like you and your friend, breaking up associations of men, encouraging weakness hedonism and selfishness, encouraging anything with a backbone (whether individuals groups or countries) to hate itself and disintegrate.

Pic related is Mishima, who did the same thing even though across the world from Evola. Men with backbones are still out there. It's the natural will of the human spirit. You are fighting back every time you try to make something of yourself and to create order in chaos. You will find that you are never creating arbitrary order (arbitrariness is chaos, and the forces of chaos always want you to think exactly that all "creation of order" is just more arbitrariness, therefore why not just do nothing instead?), you are always finding existing orders trying to come into being and joining with them as an equal, as long as you have created the seeds of order within yourself too. Go looking for these deeper currents and you will find them in the world as they awaken in you, in tandem.