Who do you read with /lit/?

[Anonymous No.16669304]

>On a typical evening at Tribschen Wagner and his wife ask, when the children are asleep, what book they should read together. Plato? Not yet bound. Schiller? Read him recently. Calderon? Shakespeare? Homer? 'We decide,' Cosima writes, 'on the last.' (I'm pleased at that, for Homer is far and away my favourite reading.) 'Most wonderful impression,' Cosima writes, 'a sublimely intimate evening, indelible images stamped on my mind. Untroubled sleep.'
>In the next day's entry she writes, 'The evening [is] crowned with four cantos from the Odyssey (Calypso, Nausicaa, Leucothea). Only distraction during the reading is watching R[ichard]'s fine, radiant countenance and delighting in the sound of his voice.' And on successive evenings she writes, about subsequent books of the Odyssey, 'Great delight ... The splendid happenings seem like a dream picture to me ... [Richard's] voice and his manner encompass the immortal work like music.
>One day, over lunch, Wagner rates Plato's Symposium above all other literary works: 'In Shakespeare we see Nature as it is, here we have the artistic awareness of the benefactor added; what would the world know about redeeming beauty without Plato?'
>One night they decide that there are seven great books. 'Over supper we discussed our indispensables and classified them thus: Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato's Symposium, Cervantes Don Quixote, the whole of Shakespeare, and Goethe's Faust.
>The theatre at Bayreuth is opened, and they move into Wahnfried, the house Wagner designed there for himself. Properly married at last, they now have a library of over two thousand books to choose from for their evening reading. They make their way through several books of Thucydides together. Wagner wants to contrast German politics with those of classical Greece. 'Ah, they were too intelligent, those fellows,' he says of the Athenians. 'They could not last.' One day Cosima finds him reading Sophocles Oedipus and checking the translation against the original Greek. 'It is a torrent of beauty,' he says, 'now vanished forever: we are barbarians.'
>A son is born, and they draw up plans for his future reading. Philosophy: Schopenhauer. Religion: Eckhart, Tauler. Art: R. Wagner. And then, much the same great-books program as before, climaxing in the big three - Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles.

CONT

[Anonymous No.16669305]

>>16669304
>There is something touching, finally, about the older, thoroughly domesticated couple, in an age before television, setting down again to read the Odyssey - she listening, as Penelope once did, and he reading the tale, as Odysseus once told it to his wife. He reads, she says, 'in so sublimely moving a way that I shed tears.' He concludes that Homer 'really was the poetic par excellence, the source of all poetic art, the true creator,' (He's right, as usual, in aesthetic matters.) In his last year, they return to Book 10, to the magical description of Circe's island, and the appearance of Hermes there. When they lay the book aside, he says, 'How sublime it is.'

[Anonymous No.16669377]

What is with this constant Wagner posting

[Anonymous No.16669392]

bros I can't do it anymore, how do I find a cutie like Cosima to recite Goethe and Shakespeare with?

[Anonymous No.16669415]

before tv and other entertainment, ppl read to each other, pretty normal.

but yeah, discussing the classics with wagner would be great.

[࿇ C Œ M G E N V S ࿇ !KNDYYIIins No.16669425]

READING IS LIKE POSTING: IT IS A SOLITARY ACTIVITY THAT SHOULD BE PERFORMED IN SOLITUDE.

[Anonymous No.16669457]

>>16669392
>cutie
bruh she looks like her dad

[Anonymous No.16669496]

>>16669425
fuck off, poetry is meant to be recited

[࿇ C Œ M G E N V S ࿇ !KNDYYIIins No.16669521]

>>16669496


RECITATION IS NOT READING; BOTH ENTAIL PARSING OF LANGUAGE, BUT THE LATTER NECESSARILY ENTAILS COGITATION OF WHAT IS PARSED, WHILST PRONOUNCEMENT REMAINS UNNECESSARY; THE FORMER, DOES NOT, WHILST NECESSARILY ENTAILING PRONOUNCEMENT.

[Anonymous No.16669740]

>>16669392
cuck someone

[Anonymous No.16669744]

>>16669457
Her dad was a chad loved by all. Women would literally throw themselves at his feet caught in the rapture of performance.

[Anonymous No.16669817]

Reading is fundamentally a solitary activity. If you mean reading and speaking at the same time, that's reciting.
As with most things, the introduction of a social aspect derails most serious thinking. Conversation becomes a part of the social game that is regrettably a part of fundamental human nature. This is inefficient and a waste of time and resources. Much more effecient and effective is for example the paractice of exchanging letters. With letter, people have time to think of what to say and convey to the other person, instead of blurting whatever first comes to mind to avoid disrupting the "flow of the conversation" and to avoid "awkwardness". This inevitably leads to shallow discussion.
With reading to others it is mostly the same; reading becomes a way of gaining social acceptance in the eyes of others, in one way or another, and the true meaning of the text is lost in mechanical pronunciation of words.
Though, I don't condemn discussion; I greatly enjoy discussion with people. With two people together, discussion is a great way to exchange ideas, though it still easily falls in the aforementioned traps.
This changes when there are more than two people; the needs of all the people need to be satisfied to be able to hold meaningful conversation, or one will leave the conversation or derail it completely.
The modern society glorifies these people that try their best to entertain hordes of people at the same time. This is achieved through adapting the content to be suitable for all people, thus effectively dumbing it down. Most of the time the people in this role are not even able to formulate more complex thoughts than this, and the same can be said for most of the listeners too.

[Anonymous No.16669841]

>>16669425
>>16669817
Why is /lit/ like this? Why do you presume everyone to be dumb and incapable of thought other than you? Of course you rationally know this isn't true, but you put it fully into belief when you can't imagine actually mutually experiencing another of intelligence in practice, in conversation or in reading.

[Anonymous No.16669856]

>>16669841
That's why I say "most" or "many".
You have to realize that half of the people around you have an IQ of 100.

[࿇ C Œ M G E N V S ࿇ !KNDYYIIins No.16669858]

>>16669841


?

READING, AND POSTING, ARE SOLITARY ACTIVITIES; THE ACTOR’S INTELLIGENCE IS NOT A FACTOR.

[Anonymous No.16669882]

>>16669856
Then your critique is worthless in the case of Cosima and Wagner, of course him [one of] the greatest genius of his time and the other the daughter of another genius, undoubtedly a very woman as if it wasn't already known is shown by many reports about her (such as by Nietzsche).

I don't see how your post was anything other than a misconstrued very personal emotional response.

>>16669858
They are strictly solitary actives only to those without a brain. And bugmen who value the idea of their alone intelligence forever so their lonely hours may seem no different.

[࿇ C Œ M G E N V S ࿇ !KNDYYIIins No.16669888]

>>16669882


YOUR REPLY TO MY POST IS NONSENSICAL.

[Anonymous No.16669887]

>>16669882
*a very intelligent woman*

[Anonymous No.16669913]

>>16669888
I was too harsh, but I do wonder why you have annoyance for so innocent an enjoyment? In my case, and I think for any others if he tried it properly, I find no difficulty in hearing another read a book or doing it myself and functioning perfectly as fine, if not better with the active possibility of the other, that is to make possible a greater variety for reading these words.

[Anonymous No.16669924]

>>16669425
antilogocentrism is a solitary activity that should be performed in solitude

[࿇ C Œ M G E N V S ࿇ !KNDYYIIins No.16669976]

>>16669913


TWO PERSONS CAN BE READING IN THE SAME ROOM, SIDE BY SIDE, EVEN FROM ONE SAME BOOK, BUT THAT DOES NOT ALTER THE SOLITARY QUALITY OF THE ACTIVITY —EACH PERSON IS READING ALONE IN COMPANY.

[Anonymous No.16670000]

>>16669976
And what if one is reading to the other??? What did you mean by the word "solitude" then when you said reading should be done in it?

[࿇ C Œ M G E N V S ࿇ !KNDYYIIins No.16670048]

>>16670000
>And what if one is reading to the other???

IF YOU ARE READING TO SOMEONE YOU ARE RECITING, NOT READING.


>What did you mean by the word "solitude" then when you said reading should be done in it?

SOLITUDE: «THE STATE, OR QUALITY, OF BEING ALONE».

A SOLITARY ACTIVITY IS ONE WHICH CAN, AND/OR SHOULD, BE PERFORMED ONLY WHILST ALONE.

READING CANNOT BE PERFORMED COLLECTIVELY, THEREFORE, IT IS A SOLITARY ACTIVITY, AND ANY ATTEMPT TO CHANGE THAT WILL PRODUCE ABORTIVE RESULTS, OR TURN IT INTO ANOTHER ACTIVITY.

[Anonymous No.16670080]

>>16670048
>IF YOU ARE READING TO SOMEONE YOU ARE RECITING, NOT READING.
So this is a problem of technical terminology, why not be more precise? Why be so obsessive in the first place?

[Anonymous No.16670089]

>>16669377
>why are people talking about the greatest playwright since Shakespeare

[Anonymous No.16670097]

>>16669304
>ywn be an artistic genius in the 1800's married to a qt3.14 with whom to read and discuss the classics
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH

[Anonymous No.16670113]

>>16669425
Cum and die megafaggot

[Anonymous No.16670115]

>>16670097
>Wagner, at this time, had moved into a cottage built in the grounds of Wesendonck's villa, where, during his work on Tristan und Isolde, he became passionately involved with Mathilde Wesendonck. Whether or not this relationship was platonic remains uncertain. One evening in September of that year, Wagner read the finished poem of "Tristan" to an audience including his wife, Minna, his current muse, Mathilde, and his future mistress (and later wife), Cosima von Bülow.

[Anonymous No.16670273]

>>16669817
Absolute bugman. What a weak will and intellect you must have to need to factor efficiency and effectiveness into your reading. Here I thought we were engaging with humanity, ours and others, but your wisdom reveals we're actually working on spreadsheets - developing some autistic calculus to grind up and sieve art into affectless powder.

[Anonymous No.16670302]

>>16670089
Not literature.

[Anonymous No.16670414]

>>16670302
the texts were published as autonomous poetry too.
the ring was modeled after oresteia (originally also a tetralogy)

[Anonymous No.16670569]

>>16670414
Is Das Rheingold really equivalent to a Satyr play?

[Anonymous No.16670704]

>>16670569
rheingold = agamemnon

>the hellenes had a fine sense of the sanctity of night. the profoundest sense of it must have been revealed to those attending the great performance of the oresteia of aeschylus.
>this began in daylight: agamemnon - complete human error - crime - desire
>afternoon: electra - revenge - expiation - punishment
>with the eumenides dusk falls; at the end fully night: the young men escort the appeased, reconciled daemons of revenge in torchlight procession to their nocturnal place of rest.
t. wagner

[Anonymous No.16671292]

>>16670704
I assumed that's what you meant initially, but then I figured you were comparing The Rheingold to the Satyr play because of how Wagner considered it a "preliminary evening" and in some way specially prior to the meat of the three. And though I can see how he based it on the Oresteia now with so fantastic a quote as you have provided, Gotterdammerung hardly takes the place of a Satyr play, but it's part of the whole which is dusk I guess.

By the way where did you find that quote anon?

[Anonymous No.16671298]

What's the best translation of the Ring Cycle?

[Anonymous No.16671386]

>>16671298
A dual language version.

[Anonymous No.16671479]

>>16671386
Any specific translator?

[Anonymous No.16671488]

>>16671298
I'm pretty sure this is universally considered the best as of yet:

https://www.amazon.com.au/Wagners-Ring-Nibelung-Richard-Wagner/dp/0500281947

[Anonymous No.16671510]

>>16671479
To my knowledge Spencer's is really the only one that features dual-text still in publication.

[Anonymous No.16671523]

>>16670115
How was he so Chad?

[Anonymous No.16671567]

>>16671292
its from his "brown book" diary

[Anonymous No.16671706]

>>16671488
>>16671510
I'm partial to the language of older translation.
This is the first translation of the Ring Cycle. Will I lose anything significant if I read this?
https://archive.org/details/cu31924022253078/page/n63/mode/2up

[Anonymous No.16671878]

>>16669740
At this point I'm convinced this is the only way, as Wagner himself also got Cosima by cucking someone else. Any quality female that I've seen so far had been already taken, so there isn't much of a choice in that regard. One has to be ruthless in this realm.

[Anonymous No.16671921]

>>16671706
That's between you and your god. This doesn't have a German text alongside it so that would bother me. But if you get enjoyment and understanding from that version then so be it.

[Anonymous No.16671968]

>>16670115
Based Chad

[Anonymous No.16673659]

>>16669304
Wagner is the most based and unjustly overhated man to ever live.

[Anonymous No.16674630]

>>16669304
>Philosophy: Schopenhauer.
What an absolute retard.

[Anonymous No.16674644]

>>16669425
I'd love to agree with you, but I think it's just cope. Most of us don't know how to declamate a poem with pathos, nor we know how to make the words sing, nor we have a nuanced relationship with metrics.

[Anonymous No.16674668]

>>16673659
Are you sure anon?

[Anonymous No.16674673]

>>16669304
Damn reading shit like this makes me realize "art" was always just a fashion element for the rich

[Anonymous No.16674750]

>>16674673
Anon, I'm sure he's read those figures more thoroughly in the past, what's wrong with just relaxing and casually reading a book for enjoyment?

[Anonymous No.16674761]

>>16674644
Very much this.

[Anonymous No.16674787]

>>16674630
Does that make you seethe that most geniuses of the past two centuries were in love with Schopenhauer's philosophy? Who else is an absolute retard in your mind aside Wagner? Einstein and Schrodinger maybe, or Tolstoy and Proust?

[Anonymous No.16674839]

>>16674787
>Einstein and Schrodinger maybe, or Tolstoy and Proust?
If we're talking about philosophy, yes for all of them. Schopenhauer is catnip for aesthetes

[Anonymous No.16674851]

>>16674839
Oh I very much agree. Einstein is an retard when it comes to philosophy but Anonymous No.16674839 certainly isn't. Fuck off before embarrassing yourself any further.

[Anonymous No.16674864]

>>16669304
What does not yet bound mean? There wasn't a good edition available or what?

[Anonymous No.16675253]

>>16674864
There was no such thing as the printing press a hundred years ago, people had to make their own books, and the gluing process took a while for the bound to fit.

[Anonymous No.16675343]

>>16669425
>tfw used to shitpost with my ex
God I miss that crazy whore.

[Anonymous No.16675569]

>>16669304
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6lRoIlXzdU

>"For this is the essence of true Religion: that, away from the cheating show of the daytide world, it shines in the night of man's inmost heart, with a light quite other than the world-sun's light, and visible nowhence save from out that depth." — Wagner's "State and Religion."

>" Under the leaf of many a Fable lies
>The Truth for those who look for it; of this
>If thou wouldst look behind and find the Fruit,
>(To which the Wiser hand hath found his way)
>Have thy desire — No Tale of Me and Thee,
>Though I and Thou be its Interpreters."
> — Salaman and Absal of Jamal

>The real meaning of this noble and deeply touching drama has been so misunderstood by those who have not had the opportunity or inclination to study the poem and its author's prose works that it will be necessary at the outset to show how mystical that meaning is. The long quotation in our last article on the Ring revealed Wagner's intuitive perception, from the first, of the great principle of Renunciation — the Stilling of Desire, and his realization of its logical necessity by the aid of Schopenhauer's clear-cut thought.

>Towards the close of 1854, when that great philosopher first began to claim his attention, Wagner writes to Liszt:

>"His chief idea, the final negation of the desire of life, is terribly serious but it shows the only salvation possible. To me of course that thought was not new, and, indeed, it can be conceived by no one for whom it did not pre-exist; but this philosopher was the first to place it clearly before me."

>Two years later the subject is mentioned again and a quotation from a letter will serve to show how all these works grew out of one another and were intimately connected in their inner meaning in Wagner's mind. We have shown in the previous article how he connected Siegfried and Tristan, in their "bondage to an illusion." Now he refers to an idea for a Buddhist drama, which later developed into Parsifal:

>"I have again two splendid subjects which I must execute. Tristan and Isolde you know, and after that Der Sieg (Victory), the most sacred, the most perfect salvation. . . To me it is most clear and definite, but not as yet fit for communication to others. Moreover you must first have digested my Tristan, especially its third act, with the black flag and the white. Then first will my Sieger become a little more intelligible to you."

>It may be mentioned here that Tristan is one of the Knights connected with the Celtic versions of the Parsifal and Holy Grail legends.

CONT

[Anonymous No.16675574]

>>16675569
>Of Die Sieger (The Victors) the sketch alone remains and I shall refer to it more fully when I deal with Parsifal. For the present I shall have enough to do to clearly indicate the "inner soul-motives" which connect Tristan with the earlier dramas and to clear this singularly pure love-allegory from the vulgar charges of immorality and sensuality which have been brought against it. In his fine essay Zukunfts music (Music of the Future) which belongs to his later and more deeply mystical period, Wagner traces the Thread-Soul which governed the development of his dramas from the Flying Dutchman up to Tristan and Isolde. Pointing to the lesson of the terrible power of Doubt embodied in Lohengrin he goes on to say:

>"I, too, felt driven to this "Whence and Wherefore?" and for long it banned me from the magic of my art. But my time of penance taught me to overcome the question. All doubt at last was taken from me when I gave myself up to the Tristan. Here, in perfect trustfulness, I plunged into the inner depths of soul-events, and from the inmost centre of the world I fearlessly built up its outer form. . . Life and death, the whole import and existence of the outer world, here hang on nothing but the inner movements of the soul. The whole affecting Action comes about for reason only that the inmost soul demands it, and steps to light with the very shape foretokened in the inner shrine."

>In the face of such words as these there is only one possible light in which to regard this drama; and yet there is some excuse for those who cannot see its inner meaning, since the writings of Tennyson, Malory and others on this same subject all lean more or less to the gross and sensual. It has remained for Wagner's deeper insight to grasp the true meaning of the myth and mould it in a drama of unique beauty.

Though it's a theosophy website, it does have a very good explanation of Trisan und Isolde:

https://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/theos/v12n07p321_richard-wagners-music-dramas.htm

[Anonymous No.16676176]

bump.

[Anonymous No.16676184]

>>16669304
>'Ah, they were too intelligent, those fellows,' he says of the Athenians. 'They could not last.'
bros...

[Anonymous No.16676200]

>>16676184
Why is it every great figure of the last two hundred years has had the same thought? I think even Heidegger considered the possibility that the likes of Greek tragedy will never be found again, and it was entirely a unique moment in the revelation of being in history. Other means, other ends, to go on.

[Anonymous No.16676204]

>>16676200
were the Greeks truly our zenith? which other era can compare? everything after them certainly imitates them, at least

[Anonymous No.16676224]

>>16676204
Come now, life is still life worth living, art and drama and philosophy itself can never be lost, only displaced and moved to another area. And history is not moving downwards to its end alone. Didn't Wagner say that "the Antique would have stayed unknown, in its now universal world-significance, had the German spirit not recognised and expounded it." If in pure creative development, the Germans surely rival the Greeks in their significance. Hell, Heidegger did prophesise that the only hope for the world would be if or when God awakens the German people after a time of nihilism.

>The Christian religion belongs to no specific national stock: the Christian dogma addresses purely - human nature. Only in so far as it has seized in all its purity this content common to all men, can a people call itself Christian in truth. However, a people can make nothing fully its own but what becomes possible for it to grasp with its inborn feeling, and to grasp in such a fashion that in the New it finds its own familiar self again. Upon the realm of aesthetics and philosophic Criticism it may be demonstrated, almost palpably, that it was predestined for the German spirit to seize and assimilate the Foreign, the primarily remote from it, in utmost purity and objectivity of intuition (in höchster objektiver Reinheit der Anschauung). One may aver, without exaggeration, that the Antique would have stayed unknown, in its now universal world-significance, had the German spirit not recognised and expounded it. The Italian made as much of the Antique his own, as he could copy and remodel; the Frenchman borrowed from this remodelling, in his turn, whatever caressed his national sense for elegance of Form: the German was the first to apprehend its purely-human originality, to seize therein a meaning quite aloof from usefulness, but therefore of the only use for rendering the Purely-human. Through its inmost understanding of the Antique, the German spirit arrived at the capability of restoring the Purely-human itself to its pristine freedom; not employing [156] the antique form to display a certain given 'stuff,' but moulding the necessary new form itself through an employment of the antique conception of the world. (02) To recognise this plainly, let anyone compare Goethe's Iphigenia with that of Euripides. One may say that the true idea of the Antique has existed only since the middle of the eighteenth century, since Winckelmann and Lessing.
- What is German?

[Anonymous No.16676582]

>>16669817
Have sex

[Anonymous No.16676754]

>>16674668
Yeah and your picture doesn't convince anyone, /pol/tard.

[Anonymous No.16676766]

>>16676754
That's traditional Wagnerian right up to 1945 to you, tranny.

[Anonymous No.16676819]

>>16669304
>Tfw you will never have a based lit gf who makes you a better man but instead a vapid tik tok slut on birth control

I'm beginning to lose hope bros

[Anonymous No.16676850]

>>16670302
Are you fucking retarded? Wagner was both a composer AND a playwright and imo the greatest history has ever produced.

[Anonymous No.16676859]

>>16676766
>tranny
Ironic coming from a Wagner fanboy who probably dresses up like his hero AND a Nazi piece of shit since most of you are trannies and femboys LARPing on Twitter.

[Anonymous No.16676865]

>>16676859
>Ironic coming from a Wagner fanboy who probably dresses up like his hero AND a Nazi piece of shit since most of you are trannies and femboys LARPing on Twitter.
project more, faggot

[Anonymous No.16676881]

>>16676865
>n-n-no u
Yeah sure buddy

[Anonymous No.16676883]

>>16669304
I don't feel so bad about my neckbeard anymore

[Anonymous No.16676892]

>>16676881
you're the fag with that picture saved, not me

[Anonymous No.16676913]

>>16676859
Vulpine gossip? I am not surprised by one who feels dejected by the sight of a long-dead master. Your eager mention of transsexuals is entirely un-related, and obviously entirely to do with yourself than with Wagner at all. Wagner wore silk because he had a skin condition.. "Wha whaa this must mean he's a sexual degenerate like meeee!!!". Yikes!

[Anonymous No.16677926]

>>16674851
>Oh I very much agree. Einstein is an retard when it comes to philosophy but Anonymous No.16674839 certainly isn't
Exaxtly. From your POV this claim should at the very least sound plausible, since so far I have said nothing particularly stupid about philosophy, unlike Einstein (i.e. his complete misunderstanding of Spinoza snd Kant)