/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.21246672]

How do you read ancient or classic literature without getting depressed? Every paragraph it seems there's some casual reference to pain, death, terror, child abuse, just a pure stream of hate and anger in every classic book I've read.
>Try reading Plato, Laches. First few pages a character talks about abusing and manipulating his kids so as to discipline them
>Aristotle, Ethics. Talks about how some people are born to be slaves and how it's okay to abuse them
>Homer, constant bloodshed and terror and violence
I want to never read again if this is the contents

[Anonymous No.21246680]

>>21246672
Read Charmides and Lysis then.

[Anonymous No.21246688]

>>21246680
>read charmenides
>they start giving outdated medical advice which likely hurt people trying to follow the advice
fuck this

[Anonymous No.21246694]

>>21246672
>pain, death, terror, child abuse, just a pure stream of hate and anger
That's life
And as funny as it may seem
Some people get their kicks
Stompin' on a dream
But I don't let it,
Let it get me down
'Cause this fine old world,
It keeps spinning around

[Anonymous No.21246707]

>>21246672
i'll read them in your stead

[Anonymous No.21246721]

>>21246707
but what will you gain from it though? why should you? I just cannot seem to find what the gain or benefit of reading 2000 pages of stupid bullshit and hatred will do for me. I am starting to think that reading books is as useful as watching movies, or listening to albums. There is no gain, it's just time wasting

[Anonymous No.21246722]

>>21246672
Norms were different back then, you can't take these works at face value.

[Anonymous No.21246729]

>>21246672
>Every paragraph it seems there's some casual reference to pain, death, terror, child abuse, just a pure stream of hate and anger in every classic book I've read.
>Slaves
>Bloodshed
How much soi and estrogen do you need to have in your bloodstream to regard this things as "bad"?

[Anonymous No.21246731]

>>21246722
then how should i take them, just ignore the constant dumbfuck retardation? Just ignore the constantly insulative and mean tone of basically every author I've read?

[Anonymous No.21246742]

>>21246729
You're most likely too stupid to figure out how to avoid pain, so you think it's just part of life. Unconscious npc dumbfuck

[Anonymous No.21246761]

>>21246742
Its honestly sad that you regard even pain as evil when its one of the most necessary and useful things in life. Not even worth debating with.
>Unconscious npc dumbfuck
Pure projection

[Anonymous No.21246769]

>>21246761
then go inflict pain on yourself, if you love it so much. The fact that you don't see that those things are bad means you likely just never experienced anything good, which makes sense considering your level of general awareness / consciousness.

[Anonymous No.21246771]

Read the diaries (ricordanzi) of Pitti and Dati, and Centuries of Childhood by Philippe Aries

[Anonymous No.21246773]

>>21246742
The world is going to chew you up and spit you out someday, it’s not a nice place

[Anonymous No.21246782]

>>21246769
>Heh you dont believe all pain is bad?
>Therefore you must believe all pain is good!
Unironically dont bother with greeks, they are too high above you

[Anonymous No.21246787]

When I read pre-modern literature, I don't get depressed about their world. I get depressed about ours.

[Anonymous No.21246801]

I think classical culture was able to find some sort of beauty in death and brutality and was a martial culture to a huge degree. Every remarkable Roman king, senator, and emperor was first and foremost a general. Compare that with our modern civilization where the elite is made of bankers, lawyers, professors, all humanists first and foremost. The ancients were almost the polar opposites of us in every conceivable way.

[Anonymous No.21246853]

>>21246787
This

[Anonymous No.21246873]

>>21246787
hyper retardation

[Anonymous No.21246892]

>>21246672
I was going to take you seriously but this is obviously a trollpost. On the small chance that it isn't - get the fuck over yourself. Not everyone thinks the same way you do. Big deal. Get over it.

[Anonymous No.21247116]

>>21246721
Don’t worry about it my man, these books and knowledge were never meant to be for everybody, there’s no shame in being a lesser soul. Philosophy and high art, specially ancient philosophy and art, is for high souls only, you can be content with your books and albums.

[Anonymous No.21247195]

>>21246672
>Reading Diodorus
>Agathocles orders captured towns people hung (alive) from siege towers so that defenders would be forced to fire on their family/friends and neighbours.
>Takes the town eventually and massacres everyone.
It's a little depressing, but I guess it gives some perspective as to how "good" we have it in modernity.

[Anonymous No.21247502]

>>21246672
>How do you read ancient or classic literature without getting depressed?
Dude, ancient literature is badass. Makes me feel invigorated.

[Anonymous No.21247509]

>>21246672
oh, that's easy, I just don't read that kind of shit.

[Anonymous No.21247574]

>>21246672
seems like a problem with your mentality more than anything. a causes b, there is a franker bluntness to it rather than hiding behind multiple layers of moral abstraction, universalization, and myopia.

I find it kinda sad actually that you cannot appreciate this. When I read these things, it usually seems like rawer emotions that arent as filtered through half understood templates. Every paragraph also has joy, life, amazement, childhood actualization, just a pure stream of emotion and true sensation in very classical book I’ve read.

like actually, its pains me to hear that you find something multifaceted and raw as bad because it does not find a reason to cover up the rainbow of human experience.

I much prefer it to a cultivated banal reflection.

[Anonymous No.21247892]

>>21246873
This, what would we do without our onions and vaccines?

[Anonymous No.21247989]

>haha life is hard, bro, pain and violence is all around us, guess not everyone could be an alpha like me, huh

[Anonymous No.21247991]

>>21247892
>what would we do without vaccines
Die. A shitload of children died before vaccines.

[Anonymous No.21248104]

>>21247574
lack of empathy brings you to the level of a pig. you love watching someone's suffering as a resource that feeds your egoistic degraded fantasies and dreams of yourself being s special, intelligent thinker, where as you're just an hollow fake leach with psychopathic tendencies you're too coward to express in real life. and it doesn't matter whether stuff happened thousand years ago or is happening now in front of you, what matters is the way you look at it, as a smirking arrogant bystander wanking off on someone's pain, or you relate to it to the realistically possible extent. thoughts are define actions, actions define reality, your reality, which, according to the pic you've attached, is not far from the reality of a creature I've mentioned at the beginning

[Anonymous No.21248311]

>>21246694
words cannot express how much i love every last detail about Sinatra, that's life is one of the songs i took most out of about how to live life

[Anonymous No.21248331]

>>21246672
Some people are born to be slaves.
You really think the zoomies of today would be as bad as they are if they got the beating of a lifetime the moment they posted their cinnamon snorting challenge?
War is regrettable but at times justified.
Bloodshed is regrettable but unavoidable.

[Anonymous No.21248336]

>>21246672
Why are frogposters so fucking stupid?

[Anonymous No.21248344]

>>21246672
Modernity outsourced its bloodletting (along with manufacturing jobs), and keeps the kidfucking under wraps. It's all happening still, even slavery.

Be thankful the ancients gave you truth and clarity.

[Anonymous No.21248351]

>>21247991
And?

[Anonymous No.21249685]

>>21246672
This is literally just culture shock and you misconstruing things because you can't deal with the fact that someone doing something different to you does not make them all evil and abusive and hateful.

You didn't even provide examples of actual everyday suffering which were in abundance. If you can't appreciate a different time and/or place, then don't bother and read something more coddling instead.

[Anonymous No.21249696]

>>21248104
Is this a joke? You can't make this post and OP while talking about fucking empathy. That is exactly what you are missing, you petulant child. Empathy does not mean display of emotion or feeling what you want someone to feel. Talk about fucking empathy while inventing some grand dehumanised evil when it doesn't go your way. Ridiclous.

[Anonymous No.21249818]

>>21246672
such was the preincarnational world

[Anonymous No.21249823]

>>21246672
You could look at it more positively. The point of Laches was Socrates trying to teach that particular guy the truth so he could help his children also.

[Anonymous No.21249829]

>>21247991
And here we see the faggot humanist.
>Nooo muh human rights
Aa farce. It doesn't matter you have a right to determine what color your hair is, your profession, or if you're allowed to run naked down main street overdosing on hormones and ketamine
>Nooooooo muh vaccines
to solve a problem greatly exacerbated by modern industrial society
>nooo muh reliable food supply
At the expense of societal obligation.
>Nooooooo muh modern medicine
life is not better because it's longer
>noooooo muh better living standards and gdp
Maybe good is not how high you can make the lines on your graph

[Anonymous No.21249858]

>>21246672
>and how it's okay to abuse them
You're literally imagining things into the text, probably due to emotional word association. Aristotle says it's specifically not ok to abuse slaves.

[Anonymous No.21249859]

>>21246801
>>21246672
The terror mentality is still alive in atheism. The whole bet by the humanists is to replace the physical violence with intellectual violence, so that when the cattle is finished with arguing, they go back to work for the bourgeois.
Marxist and communist parties that came to power in the early to mid 20th century tended to have a siege mentality. This is because they were ran by revolutionaries that spent most of their political career on the run from government forces and thinking everyone in their meetings could be a double agent collecting information for the authorities to bust them. When these individuals took power they maintained that siege mentality but scaled up their perceived enemies to match. They went from worrying about their comrade being a paid police informant to worrying about one of their cabinet members being on the payroll of a foreign government, or a counter-revolutionary group, or any number of other boogeymen. Those forces absolutely did exist, but there was a definite tendency to jump at shadows.

Leftist political movements also hate each other just as much as they hate right wing nationalists or liberals, maybe even moreso. If you talk to someone associated with leftist movements even now they'll tell you the same thing. There are a million different interpretations of what they think ought to be done, and since individual parties/political groups like to put on a show of having complete unanimity and unity of purpose they cast out anyone who deviates even slightly from the preferred path.

[Anonymous No.21249916]

>>21246672
>How do you read ancient or classic literature without getting depressed?
by reading it

[Anonymous No.21250580]

duh

[Anonymous No.21250937]

[Anonymous No.21250940]

>>21246672
Modern life might not have the physical intensity of suffering as then, but the soul can suffer just as much as a person from the ancients. You are just a pampered piece of shit that will amount to nothing with no life experiences.

[Anonymous No.21251304]

I'm just getting started in an attempt to learn a bit of Latin, hopefully to be able to make some sense of some medieval ebooks I've accumulated. If it goes well, who knows, maybe I'll try to read some ancient texts as well.
Anybody else been down this path? Any advice would be welcome.
As would any texts with facing Latin and English translations. I think I have a version of Caesar's campaign in Gaul that fits that bill, but would be interested in any other recommendations.