/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20978427]

Give me your best quotes on the horrors of the world of nature and it’s lack of meaning or morality

[Anonymous No.20978453]

“I made love to my daughter, my own flesh and blood, and after she said ‘Thank you, daddy. I really liked that game.’ We both smiled.”

[Anonymous No.20978467]

>>20978427
Trite.

[Anonymous No.20978473]

>>20978453
The pretense of a game implies that the girl was not of age, yet her apparent pleasure from the act implies that she was indeed mature enough to enjoy it. Otherwise, a grown man's lust should have caused her significant discomfort. This leads me to the suspicion that his daughter was some variety of mental invalid, a grown woman developmentally delayed so as to retain the mental characteristics of a child.

[Anonymous No.20978483]

>>20978427
Human experience is the search for meaning, relentless ordering of a world and a life much too vast for us to fully comprehend. Our stories and our memories are all forms and paltry representations of a sea of change, motion and information. You need to tell yourself a story that mythologizes your own happiness.

[Anonymous No.20978530]

>>20978427
“It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer.”
-Arthur Schopenhauer

[Anonymouṡ No.20978576]

>>20978427
It's "its".

[Anonymous No.20978846]

“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
― Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

“I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs, a very endearing sight, I'm sure you'll agree. And even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters, who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen. Mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that is when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”

― Terry Pratchett

[Anonymous No.20978857]

>>20978846
>“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
What a midwit holy shit

[Anonymous No.20978963]

>>20978846
Terry Pratchett has a lot of good quotes.
"But let us know we do not live in vain" is my absolute favorite, and I'm getting it tattooed.

[Anonymous No.20978970]

>>20978857

I think Dawkins is quite arrogant and sometimes annoying, but what’s wrong with that quote? What’s untruthful about it?

[Anonymous No.20979070]

>>20978427
>horrors

[Anonymous No.20979143]

What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. Every one reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him. The mosquitoes bloating themselves on blood, the maggots, the killer-bees attacking with a fury and a demonism, sharks continuing to tear and swallow while their own innards are being torn out [...] Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism’s comfort and expansiveness.
-Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze9-ARjL-ZA

[Anonymous No.20979173]

Am I the only one who is legitimately thinking of killing themselves just to stop thinking about this kind of stuff?

How do normies love their life not fretting over things like locked-in syndrome, genocide and the inevitable eventual destruction of everything they know and love?

[Anonymous No.20979184]

Am I the only one who is legitimately thinking of killing themselves just to stop thinking about this kind of stuff?

How do normies live their life not fretting over things like locked-in syndrome, genocide and the inevitable eventual destruction of everything they know and love?

[Anonymous No.20979186]

>>20979173
Inevitability is determinist cope

[Anonymous No.20979195]

[Anonymous No.20979206]

>>20979184
>>20979184
Normies don't think about any of this at all. Not because they are NPCs without soul or mentally retarded, they are just extremely ignorant, close-minded and apathetic, extremely hedonistic and materialistic, or extremely good at terminating troubling thoughts.
Normies think about fucking and making money to buy shit they don't need and watching the new marvel movie that will teach them what the world is like. The only times normies have to deal with this kind of things is when it's literally happening to them, then they turn to religion or politics.
I took the Zapffe pill.

[Anonymous No.20979219]

>>20979186
What do you mean? The people you love will not last longer than 130 years after their birth and is literally impossible for the things you value to last longer than a few thousand years at best. The planet itself will become unlivable one day. Even if you managed to transplant the consciousness of your loved ones into space faring robots or whatever, the universe itself probably has an expiration date.

[Anonymous No.20979228]

>>20979184
Why in the fuck is your death somehow going to ruin your life?
Fucking read some Epicurean logic and drop the idiot pessimist ideas.

>>20979206
Yeah, we/they do, but they either repress it or grow up. Okay some are ignorant, some are willfully ignorant, but plenty, who do face it are simply mature about it. Describing that as close minded is ridiculous. The frog and you are being close minded. Stuck in your wrong headed philosophical pov.
>I took the metaphysician pill
Which is why you’re still a broken person

[Anonymous No.20979238]

>>20979184
Just don't think about it. Do animals feel fear for their future death? Do they worry? Do they reflect on what might happen? No, they don't have the capacity. And they are happy. Enjoy what you have while you can, and don't think too hard. What good has ever come from constantly worrying about your death?

[Anonymous No.20979258]

>>20978427
Here is a passage, not mine, but holy shit it's good. This is as depressing as it gets

I have always thought of Camus' prose as the same strain of Epicurus. It's the words of a sad man, in the plight of discovering that the great schemes that holds culture are nothing but schemes, and that wants to rise to complete lucidity against the muteness of the World.

But only the saddest souls can grasp the despair of the Stranger or The Fall. Then, there's love, there's hope, that is coined as ropes out of the absurd. But what isn't? And you can face the schemes as schemes but what will you do, old troubled dog? You can't leave the curtains of culture and time. There's no out-world but there's no away-world neither.

To be really clear, the absurd philosophy is only followed by the sad broken mind. Most of our fellow men are breaking but not broken, they break against the world like waves against the coasts. And sure they will cry away for Love and Hope and all the schemes of culture, but the emperor is never truly naked, and we are wrapped in the world. Most men are kierkegaardians by design if they're modern or thomists if they have a more traditional fashion. But Absurdism gets wearisome for all its truth. Because the truth it reaches doesn't satisfy most men. That's why Camus' writings are great literature but not the favourite to most.

I can open my eye to the Absurd, but which men aside the broken lawyer of the Fall, will cry and despair in the face of it. Isn't the Absurd the reflection of my vain saddened soul? But a vain sadness, shallow sadness of a child that realizes the world isn't for him only and that he is knitted to an indifferent world rather than the world is knitted to him like a lovely dress.

We are the cloth of the World and he wears us away and trashes us in his swagger. Call it absurd if you had wish to be the Wearer. Or, don't give it a name, fool, and join the Ship.

[Anonymous No.20979277]

>>20978453
Trite

[Anonymous No.20979285]

>>20978427
>horrors of the world of nature
>It’s lack of meaning or morality
You're disgusting as to believe you're above your own kind, you're an animal and as any other you are subject to the same laws that reign our world, only with the mentality of a maggot, as truly just organisms that don't think cant reflect themselves without a mirror

[Anonymous No.20979363]

>>20979228
Hey, I had baby's first existential crisis a long time ago, I am a functional member of society.
I always found extremely depressing that the only solution to the harshest realities of life was either ignoring it or "sucking it up". Really hammered home how hopeless things really were when the only way out of existential despair was "acting mature".
What's wrong with what Zapffe says? He's advocating for the same thing you are.

[Anonymous No.20979374]

>>20979363
I donno what Zapffe says. Partly sucking it up and partly attempting to bend nature to your will is how we cope. We’ve always tried to bring order to chaos, An Apollonian tendency even the most Dionysian have to use. It’s our meaning to life usually, no?
Hey, no offense to you personally.

[Anonymous No.20979665]

>>20979195
This, but the full french quote is better

[Anonymous No.20979794]

>>20978530
The guy thinking himself smart rediscovering things that were said 3000 years before already.

[Anonymous No.20980278]

>>20978846
Second quote makes me hungry.