Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 1141. page

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Was Demian just a figment of Sinclair's imagination?

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“I am going to take not just all of their best authors but all of the best authors of all of the conservative imprints in this country and launch my own imprint called Dangerous Books. We are going to publish every mischievous, dissident, hellraising guy you have ever heard of… We’re going to be going live in the next seven days.”

Thoughts?

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>meteoric rise

What did they mean by this?

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Started reading more and more recently. What is one book you feel everyone should read or that makes you feel angry that someone has never read before?

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>half of the threads are about philosophy
>on the literature board

awesome

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Why is the second chapter of this book perfect? I've never felt so attached to a book in my life before. The second chapter alone could be an independent short story and it would still be glorious. I literally had to drop the book off and walk around in circles. Sweet Jesus is like I was having an attention orgasm the whole way trough.

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is there a way to solve the case before the answer is revealed at the end of the episode?
if so, what books do i need to read for mentalism gains?

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Premise 1: Life is an accident, death is natural.
Premise 2: Sleep represents our unconscious desire to return to the natural state of nothingness/non-duality.
Premise 3: our fascination with violence is a reflection of the death drive, in the sense that the act is, even if performed in a simulation, a reflection of our desire to return to a state of nothingness and non-duality.
Therefore, humans possess a death drive.

Well, the argument is no cogent; for instance, premise one seems arbitrary.

On-premise 1:
Schopenhauer said the most common form of being is the form of inanimate objects, which can be debated about forever because we'll never know that for certain. Furthermore, life seems perfectly natural its self; in fact, Nietzche would say everything is a will to power, active forces acting on other active forces, not mechanical passivity. So, life not only seems not to be an accident, if you accept Nietzsche's argument, but it is entirely natural.

On-premise 2:
Sleep also serves a teleological function; that is to say, without sleep we would die. So it seems sleep could also represent a will to live, a will to prolong life, a will to live a more enriched life. Even furthermore, one could conjecture that humans are so obsessed with experience that we sleep to enter new realms of experience; consider, some people believe that sleep is a form of threat-simulation. So, we developed a new means of experience in order to aid in our ability to learn about the environment. My point being, premise 2 seems more poetic and a reflection of personal values rather than a "truth".

On-premise 3:
Well, violence also serves the function of being used in a defensive mechanism; meaning, it can be a tool that allows us to live longer. Nevertheless, our obsession with violence is more concrete than unconscious desires, it's a neural pattern that activates in the orbital frontal cortex. And, on top of that, it does not work like a "drive" but rather much more like a "modulatory response." That is to say, aggression is a response to environmental stimuli, or internal regulatory processes such as neuroendocrine phenomena

Here is my issue with Freud and almost every other philosopher. They speculate about how reality operates, they presume rationality can carve reality out. In my view, rationality ought to be limited to commenting and reflection on rationality its self, and claims about reality need be left to observations alone. Our thoughts do not determine the nature of reality, and to think that my conception of reality is even accurate presumes that the brain has a capacity to accurately conceptualize millions of variables. No, the brain cannot even determine if the perceptual environment is real or not, yet alone determine how reality operates.

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Especially when they're smug about their consumption and have never created anything.

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Can we talk about this book?

I thought it was amazing. Had a real dark atmosphere to it. Felt more akin to Bulgakov than to Gogol though, as I'd seen advertised.

And its as dense as I'd heard. The translator must have had the patience of a saint.

Is Krasznahorkai lit's current end-of-level-boss?

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>Friend Recommends House of Leaves
>Amazon it in
>First page
Did I just fucking drop $$$ on a book that I'm not allowed to read?

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Recently a friend of my mother lost her son to cancer. The kid was only 13 years old.

After that I started rehearsing in my mind what could be said to that mother that would somehow alleviate her suffering even a little bit. I was looking for answers that did not depend upon concepts like reincarnation, karma, live after death, soul, spirit, paradise, heaven, etc. I wanted to know what I could say to a mother who has lost her child in such a tender age that could make her feel better even with the likely possibility that her sun might be nothing right now, that he might be forever gone. I could not think in an appropriate answer.

Then I asked myself this question:

>If Buddha and Christ were in the same position: needing to comfort that mother, and if they could not use any concept of life after death like the Karma and Rebirth of Buddhism, or the Paradise of Christianism, what could they possibly say? How could a really wise person comfort a mother who has lost a young son without the aid of any drop of hope that he might still exist?

Any thoughts?

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Is this book only for meatheads filled with steroids with small dicks who listen to the Joe Rogan podcast?

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We come up with phony book titles and other anons work out what they'd be about.

>The Sentinel's Silhouette
>Terminus of the Origin
>A Soliloquy for Gregor

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https://www.amazon.com/Million-Random-Digits-Normal-Deviates/dp/0833030477

>A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates is a random number book by the RAND Corporation, originally published in 1955. The book, consisting primarily of a random number table, was an important 20th century work in the field of statistics and random numbers. It was produced starting in 1947 by an electronic simulation of a roulette wheel attached to a computer, the results of which were then carefully filtered and tested before being used to generate the table. The RAND table was an important breakthrough in delivering random numbers, because such a large and carefully prepared table had never before been available. In addition to being available in book form, one could also order the digits on a series of punched cards.

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