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/lit/ - Literature

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6557829 No.6557829 [Reply] [Original]

Books are now free, effectively. Whether it be the Duino Elegies or A Color Guide to the Petrography of Carbonate Rocks: Grains, Textures, Porosity, Diagenesis, most texts you need to construct a curriculum can be found online. You can't download a lab, sure, but you can find out a great deal. Of the humanities, you can get practically everything. There's never been a better time to be an autodidact.

And what we find out is that the numbers who take up the opportunity are scarcely higher than they ever were. On /lit/ and /tv/, you will find people bitterly angry that you like 'elitist' books, movies, anything. Just *mentioning* such experiences can draw ire. But - these opportunities are free. They aren't restricted any longer. You can torrent a Straub-Huillet film for nothing, or you can pay £20 to go to the cinema and see some focus-grouped, aesthetically standardised exercise in mob psychology. You are spending money on a disposable experience. I am getting a life-changing experience for the price of some tiny fraction of my electric and broadband bills. I'm making more from less - how am I the elitist?

It's time we called time on the idea that what impedes most people's self-education is lack of 'access'. What impedes most people's self-education is their own indolence. That this could be the case was clear as soon as public libraries existed, but the arguments were always logistically plausible - you couldn't *prove* that others' lives didn't render it impossible, after all. You couldn't tell people what difficulties they should or shouldn't be having, or how they ought to live. But now all the excuses are invalid.

>> No.6557875

Bump.

>> No.6557878

"Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it."

Samuel Johnson

>> No.6557899

>>6557878
Now that's prescient

>> No.6557932

It was never about access so much as competitive effort.
You're effectively telling them: "I'm a mental gold medalist."
So they try to pretend that your efforts are worthless.
Which works, by the way. But temporarily.
The price of gold could be suppressed by a cultural movement against "superficial" or insufficiently streetwise and relatable metals.
But it would creep back up again due to a combination of inherent aesthetic appeal (gold reflects light marvellously) and rarity.
Just be aware that your "price" may never rise within your lifetime, or if you're stuck in a one horse town. I suspect you're in a toxic environment, OP. If so, get gone.

>> No.6557950

>>6557932

Oh not at all, my own immediate situation is pretty ideal actually, I'm talking generally, looking at Britain and at the English-speaking world IRL and online.

>> No.6557972

>>6557829
This is one of the most fedoraesque posts on this site.

>> No.6558043

>>6557972

No, 'fedora' is about a specific set of beliefs, you can't just call anything sincere 'fedoraesque'.

>> No.6558084

>>6557972
>>6558043
The fedora meme is only properly used for people who think they're smarter than you because they're atheist. Anything else is incorrect

>> No.6558248

Bump.

>> No.6558288

>>6557972
Saying something is fedoraesque is now fedoraesque.

>> No.6558591

>>6557950
Tell us more of ideal environments please.

>> No.6558643

>>6558591

Oh, just making art, knowing other people who do, having money from ordinary work but not such onerous ordinary work that I can't think, having a place in a community.

>> No.6558799

>>6558643
Very nice. I'm getting there too, I've also figured out it doesn't need to be harder than that. I'd add to that plenty of solitude as well as not being up and about in the mornings and generally seeing as little of Mass Man as I can. He that rhymes.

>> No.6559174

Where should I start with Henry James?

>> No.6559176

>>6559174
The Greeks.

>> No.6559504

>>6559174
The Portrait of a Lady and The Turn of the Screw

>> No.6559833

>>6559174

What >>6559504 said, and Daisy Miller.