/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20107072]

Anyone have some beautifully written nonfiction? I was reading some essays written by a poet and it was just real comfy reading

[Anonymous No.20107073]

>>20107072
I have some stuff but I'd have to struggle to locate it. Want to give me a moment

[Anonymous No.20107074]

>>20107073
Sure thing brother

[Anonymous No.20107080]

The essays of Llewelyn Powys and John Cowper Powys. Start here:
LP
>Rats in the Sacristy
>Thirteen Worthies
JCP
>Suspeded Judgments
>Visions & Revisions

[Anonymous No.20107095]

>>20107072
The Bow and the Lyre

[Anonymous No.20107113]

>>20107074
I can't find what I was looking for originally, it's lost to cyberspace. So instead here's something I wrote about the nature of God:
>https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kdI9vKzQ8sAJcQz1eyFxQJL8l1PHn8A-T7xMs-gh_nE/edit?usp=drivesdk

[Anonymous No.20107182]

>>20107072
William Gass is pretty great for this.

[Anonymouṡ No.20107537]

>>20107072

It is because this picturesque union of contrasts, belonging properly to the art of the close of the fifteenth century, pervades, in Pico della Mirandola, an actual person, that the figure of Pico is so attractive. He will not let one go; he wins one on, in spite of oneself, to turn again to the pages of his forgotten books, although we know already that the actual solution proposed in them will satisfy us as little as perhaps it satisfied him. It is said that in his eagerness for mysterious learning he once paid a great sum for a collection of cabalistic manuscripts, which turned out to be forgeries; and the story might well stand as a parable of all he ever seemed to gain in the way of actual knowledge. He had sought knowledge, and passed from system to system, and hazarded much; but less for the sake of positive knowledge than because he believed there was a spirit of order and beauty in knowledge, which would come down and unite what men's ignorance had divided, and renew what time had made dim. And so, while his actual work has passed away, yet his own qualities are still active, and he himself remains, as one alive in the grave, caesiis et vigilibus oculis, as his biographer describes him, and with that sanguine, clear skin, decenti rubore interspersa, as with the light of morning upon it; and he has a true place in that group of great Italians who fill the end of the fifteenth century with their names, he is a true HUMANIST. For the essence of humanism is that belief of which he seems never to have doubted, that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality—no language they have spoken, nor oracle beside which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate, or expended time and zeal.

[Anonymous No.20107565]

>>20107072
Eidolons by Walt Whitman

[Anonymouṡ No.20107573]

>>20107072

In the summer of 1943 I was eight, and my father and mother and small brother and I were at Peterson Field in Colorado Springs. A hot wind blew through that summer, blew until it seemed that before August broke, all the dust in Kansas would be in Colorado, would have drifted over the tar-paper barracks and the temporary strip and stopped only when it hit Pikes Peak. There was not much to do, a summer like that: there was the day they brought in the first B-29, an event to remember but scarcely a vacation program. There was an Officers' Club, but no swimming pool; all the Officers' Club had of interest was artificial blue rain behind the bar. The rain interested me a good deal, but I could not spend the summer watching it, and so we went, my brother and I, to the movies.

We went three and four afternoons a week, sat on folding chairs in the darkened Quonset hut which served as a theater, and it was there, that summer of 1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne. Saw the walk, heard the voice. Heard him tell the girl in a picture called 'War of the Wildcats' that he would build her a house, "at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow". As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

— John Wayne: A Love Song

[Anonymous No.20107575]

>>20107072
My favorite essay is The Inner Ring by CS Lewis.
Also, bizarrely, 48 Laws of Power is extremely comfy reading, not because it’s particularly poetic or even true, but because 95% of it is short historical anecdotes.

[Anonymouṡ No.20107629]

>>20107072

How short life must be, if something so fragile can last a lifetime.
KAFKA

Kafka was talking about a young woman's body. Along with the anguish, there is an unmanning tenderness in the statement, and the tenderness should be remembered when we consider what a tangle the whole business of sex was for Kafka, who never quite got away from the idea that consummation of sexual desire, if it should ever happen, would be *Schumtz* — something dirty. We need to remind ourselves that a man can be in that condition and still find inspiration in desire. If that had not been so for Kafka, he would never have said this.

[Anonymouṡ No.20107654]

>>20107072

Ihr sagt mir: „das Leben ist schwer zu tragen.“ Aber wozu hättet ihr Vormittags euren Stolz und Abends eure Ergebung?

Das Leben ist schwer zu tragen: aber so thut mir doch nicht so zärtlich! Wir sind allesammt hübsche lastbare Esel und Eselinnen.

Was haben wir gemein mit der Rosenknospe, welche zittert, weil ihr ein Tropfen Thau auf dem Leibe liegt?

Es ist wahr: wir lieben das Leben, nicht, weil wir an’s Leben, sondern weil wir an’s Lieben gewöhnt sind.


You tell me: "Life is hard to bear." But if it were otherwise why should you have your pride in the morning and your resignation in the evening?

Life is hard to bear: but do not pretend to be so tender! We are all of us pretty fine asses and she-asses of burden!

What have we in common with the rosebud, which trembles because a drop of dew is lying upon it?

It is true: we love life, not because we are wont to live, but because we are wont to love.

[Anonymouṡ No.20107660]

>>20107072

Ihr sagt mir: „das Leben ist schwer zu tragen.“ Aber wozu hättet ihr Vormittags euren Stolz und Abends eure Ergebung?
Das Leben ist schwer zu tragen: aber so thut mir doch nicht so zärtlich! Wir sind allesammt hübsche lastbare Esel und Eselinnen.
Was haben wir gemein mit der Rosenknospe, welche zittert, weil ihr ein Tropfen Thau auf dem Leibe liegt?
Es ist wahr: wir lieben das Leben, nicht, weil wir an’s Leben, sondern weil wir an’s Lieben gewöhnt sind.


You tell me: "Life is hard to bear." But if it were otherwise why should you have your pride in the morning and your resignation in the evening?
Life is hard to bear: but do not pretend to be so tender! We are all of us pretty fine asses and she-asses of burden!
What have we in common with the rosebud, which trembles because a drop of dew is lying upon it?
It is true: we love life, not because we are wont to live, but because we are wont to love.

[Anonymouṡ No.20107896]

>>20107072

...This is my essential criticism of modernism, whether perpetrated by Parker, Pound or Picasso: it helps us neither to enjoy nor endure. It will divert us as long as we are prepared to be mystified or outraged, but maintains its hold only by being more mystifying or more outrageous; it has no lasting power. Hence the compulsion on every modernist to wade deeper and deeper into violence and obscenity: hence the succession of Parker by Rollins and Coltrane, and of Rollins and Coltrane by Coleman, Ayler and Shepp. In a way, it's a relief: if jazz records are to be one long screech, if painting is to be a blank canvas, if a play is to be two hours of sexual intercourse perfrmed 'coram populo', then let's get it over, the sooner the better, in the hope that human values will then be free to reassert themselves.

— Introduction to 'All What Jazz'

[Anonymous No.20107908]

>>20107629
My dad bought a copy of this book when it came out. I must have been about 11. I was fascinated by it. I was young enough to not understand a word of it but old enough for it to be utterly intriguing as a result. The book sat on the shelf like a mystery to me. I would open it, pick a page, and marvel at how little of it I understood. I should go back and get his copy and actually read it now that I'm old enough to understand it.

[Anonymous No.20107939]

Speak, Memory (to the extent that an autobiography can be considered non-fiction)

[Anonymouṡ No.20107968]

>>20107908
Yeah, it's great. I can't endorse his politics — his entire worldview comes down to HITLER BAD MAN — but he can be excused, I guess, given that a) he grew up when he did and b) his father was killed in WWII. He's always funny and readable and he provides endless 'I must make a note of that' quotes & anecdotes & ideas for reading matter. He writes about lots of people we know (Natalie Portman) and lots of people we know vaguely (G.C.Lichtenberg) and lots of people we've never heard of but perhaps should have (Paul Muratov).

[Anonymous No.20107973]

>>20107896
I really like Larkin's essays (and his letters are insanely comfy) and generally share his tastes but I doubt his views will find many sympathizers on here.

[Anonymous No.20107990]

Larkin was a huge fan of Llewelyn Powys (mentioned above!) btw, JC Powys not so much.

[Anonymous No.20107994]

[Anonymouṡ No.20108026]

>>20107973
>I doubt his views will find many sympathizers on here.
I don't really care about the Official 4chan Verdict on Larkin or anything else. As long as the right people [i.e. me] like him, that's what matters. I'm not so sure /lit/ would hate him anyway. One can definitely find some sentiments in his letters that the average anon might endorse:


Did I say I had a TV set now? Where's all this porn they talk about? Have seen iii bummes and ii payres of Tittes since slapping my money down; no buses Christ bushes I mean. And your son Martin, going on about porn in the shops: let him come up to Hull and find some. All been stamped out by police with nothing better to do. It's like this permissive society they talk about: never permitted me anything as far as I recall. I mean like WATCHING SCHOOLGIRLS SUCK EACH OTHER OFF WHILE YOU WHIP THEM, or —
You know the trouble with old Phil is that he's never really grown up...

[Letter to Kingsley Amis, 3rd March 1979]

[Anonymous No.20108061]

>>20108026
lol the letters to Amis and Conquest were the funniest