/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.16575544]

Reading is bad for you.
Let me explain why: When you are in any situation, you won't respond with what your true soul would be doing, but instead do what you learned from the stories in books (or any sort of media, this obviously also applies to movies etc.)
Take for example some special event, like your mom dying in her sleep tonight. Since that has (hopefully) never happened to you before you don't have any experience with reacting to such an event you would subconsciously imitate the reaction of that one character in a book you recently read. The natural response would be to show your honest emotions or just do whatever your soul tells you to do, but you probably wouldn't because your subconscious may consider it inappropriate.
Another example that most of you have probably heard of is sexual intercourse. When you fuck your girlfriend for the first time you don't act out of curiosity or instinct and instead fall back to somethiing you have seen in porn before. The very personal and intimate part of it vanishes and it becomes yet another blunt action you learned by watching others. The interesting thing about this example is, that it was only decades ago that some people saw sex for the first time while having their own first time, whereas almost every other aspect of life has been covered by media for centuries.
Therefore, reading and media consumption in general turns humans into soulless, unoriginal beings.
Discuss.

[Anonymous No.16575561]

>>16575544
My true soul tells me to sit in a dark room and masturbate all day.

[Anonymous No.16575573]

>>16575561
Why would it be wrong to follow your inner voice?

[Anonymous No.16575578]

>>16575573
Because I'll end up homeless if I do that

[Anonymous No.16575594]

>>16575578
So your inner voice tells you to not get homeless?

[Anonymous No.16575624]

>>16575544
There are probably some people who do this, if not the majority. It's good to take into account you shouldn't just blatantly copy whatever you read.

Good example is candide in the story from voltaire, where candide copies the words of his philosophy teacher word for word whenever he talks to someone.

[Anonymous No.16575656]

>>16575624
yeah pretty much this, good books have more than just characters having psychological reactions to things but make you think about the world, same goes for poetry which is at its core an heuristics of the world through language

[Anonymous No.16575698]

>>16575656
So you see the world through the eyes of poets while reading their poetry? That isn't original thought either, you just copy their ideas

[Anonymous No.16575723]

>>16575698
>copy their ideas
You interpret their ideas, likely in ways that the author never intended.

[Anonymous No.16575758]

>>16575698
It's not about ideas. There is something inexpressible in the word and in the way we see it. Something that can never be told and that can never be thought. Poetry is an effort to unveil this thing and to try to show the veil (which is as inexpressible as the thing itself). It tries to create relations between expressible things and to express the inexpressible in this relation. This also means that the reader will never have the same vision than the poet, the reader makes this relation its own and discover the word himself. If you use a flashlight in the dark, it is not the flashlight you see but what it lightens and the flashlight manufacturer will never see it. I talked about language in my previous post and this was a mistake because when I'm talking about "poetry" here, I'm not only talking about poems. Bach, Tarkovsky, Bruegel, Flaubert (and many others) are all poets in their own way.
Here is a short clip by poet Yves Bonnefoy talking about this (if you can speak French): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svAJmz_lmRY

[Anonymous No.16575776]

>>16575758
he does not really talks about this, my memory failed me, but it's close enough and still interesting

[Anonymous No.16575826]

>true soul
What a meme idea. Yes when you consume media you are what you eat, but that doesn't mean it corrupts you. Do you want us all to sit in dark rooms for the sake of preserving this true soul?

Ive met people close to that ideal. People who consume nothing. They're either autistic or retarded. The type of homeless person who barely registers their environment.
As for your point about porn. People are the same 1000 years ago as they are now. Any child could walk down the streets of pompeii and see some chalk drawing of tits and a vagina or listen to a bard's dirty song. Until Brave new world happens then sex will never be a thing you go into blind.

[Anonymous No.16575843]

if you're right op, then you need to avoid having your soul influenced by other people's creativity completely. there is nothing special about reading. you need to stop listening to music, watching movies/tv, going on websites, playing video games. but it doesn't stop there: architecture and urban planning influence your thoughts, using the english language influences your thoughts as do other languages. so you need to stop talking and thinking linguistically. technology of any kind is an expression of human creativity that will influence your soul and your reactions to the world. you better go be a hermit on a mountain or something. but then the natural world also influences you: you see a bird mourn its dead babies, now your true soul is tainted when it's your turn to mourn.

[Anonymous No.16575845]

>>16575544
no, your soul curates from media the behaviours it wants. if you listen to it*

[Anonymous No.16575921]

>>16575544
doesnt meditating fix this?

[Anonymous No.16575926]

>>16575544
If I understood correctly:
>you'll end like Don Quixote if we read books
the alternative is to consider the possibilities of this limited reality enough; pretty dull imo
not a christfag, but this is kinda similar to not eating the apple: you choose to not live a boring, ignorant life at the cost of having to suffer
I would eat that apple without thinking twice; that's not life.
if you read you'll probably start to act/think like some characters from the story, but if you read enough nothing sticks
you'll always compare and replace the old models with new ones; the key word is diversity - that will ensure that you can develop critical thinking
double dubs....... pretty based anon; I wonder why nobody noticed that
also, are you a romfag?

[Anonymous No.16576403]

>>16575926
>romfag
wdym?

[Anonymous No.16577140]

>>16576403
If he is Romanian. The bill in OP's pic is a Romanian leu.

[Anonymous No.16577236]

my true soul tells me to read

[Anonymous No.16577738]

>>16575544
My mom died in her sleep when I was 20. Its nothing like the movies. There is nothing to do in the face of death. My mind couldn't even react. My family couldn't react. We're not emotionally connected people. We had a year to prepare for her death, but when it happened there was just nothing.