Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 1353. page

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RIP

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Discuss the Iliad here and ask/answer questions

My question is, how are the Greeks uniting to fight against Troy? I know they follow Agamemnon, but I'm confused about how this works. Do various kings in Greece just unite together under him as their leader? Are there ranks, such as Odysseus, or Achilles being of higher rank than someone such as Nestor since they are kings?

And who commands what?

Agamemnon commands the Achaeans, correct?

I know Achilles commands the Myrmidons, so does this not make him an Achaean?


Who does Odysseus command? The Ithicans?

I'm just getting into this and trying to grasp it, so there's quite a few things like this which I don't quite understand.

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>friends interested in certain books in my collection
>lend them
>they never read them
>but they burn through their "graphic novels" in the meantime

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Was für ein besseres Spott des Lebens
Als ein unsterblicher Lebewesen
Um einen seelenlosen Sklaven zu schmieden,
Eine Mann-Maschine in unserem eigenen Gleichnis.
Mit Gott verlassenen Mann ist verloren,
Und in seiner dunkelheit sind wir gefunden

You get to erase one literary figure from human history like they never existed. I pick Kant, he was a fucking faggot.

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Suicide is a terrible option because, in all likelihood, you will end up reliving the exact same life from the start again from the moment you die. Remember that because the perception of time is a subjective function of your consciousness, without consciousness (death), an infinity of time passes more or less instantaneously without your having perceived it. The heat death of the universe and the subsequent Big Bang.

Your next perceived moment, obviously, is when you are born again (as an infant) in the new universe. Of course you will have no memory of any of this having occurred. But as you can see, you are destined to repeat your life for eternity. This is exactly what they mean when they say "What it's like after you die is exactly what it's like before you were born".

So you can see that the correct option is to pursue as much happiness, joy, and contentment as you can in every moment. It's a heavy responsibility but I believe in you.

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Who or what are you literary inspirations?

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Is this accurate? Is the intelligence of a population directly linked to their ability to function inside and understand increasingly complex social and political ideologies?

Is Latin America what happens when you bring advanced political ideas to a population that lacks the philosophical foundation to support it?

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Why were the Greeks so fucking great? What the is it about them that allowed them to become so amazing? So fucking amazing that mankind(the part of mankind that matters: The West(Europe)) is still(granted it's a relatively small minority) jerking off to them in ecstatic orgasm after thousands of years? Sometimes I'm filled with incredible amount of life force from reading them or about them, and other times it's crushing depressive episodes where I realize I'll never witness them by my own eyes, witness everything from the simplest of social interactions to the greatest wonders of the ancient world, never be one of them. Can you imagine the festivals? The orators? The feasts? Modern Greeks(Gayreeks) are for the most part pathetic unironic Christians(Jewish), do they not know what they come from? How are they not ashamed? What is it that's stopping Europe today from pulling itself up to similar heights? Is it because everything has become too big, we're too many? Too complacent? Are we just doomed to painful mediocrity and the seemingly eternal meme of "science"? What's the point in """sciencing""" your way to other fucking planets when there's nothing there, everything will have to be built anew by the people sent there. What will be built? The disgusting glass buildings we all know and love from today, those pathetic excuses for architecture? Is that really the best? Or what about some sterile bleak bubble wrap looking beehive contraption? And who will populate these colonies? The same kind of bags of flesh who love the current mess of a society we live in? How long would it take for the colony to shit itself? What if we meet ayyliens? Will we show them our big go boom-boom rockets or will we show them the greatest works of mankind? Where is it all headed? What's that discussion called about how the current times are viewed as "non-historic" times or something akin to that? As if everything has stopped and now """everyone""" is """smart""" and """moral""" and """good""" and life is just about """"living life"""" and """traveling""" and ""fucking"" and """eating good food like pizza"""? I never signed up for this, I didn't ask for this, didn't ask for this life. What is there to do? I don't give a flying fuck about contributing to the eternal meme machine known as the """""""economy""""""". Why? Just to be able to symbolically ejaculate on other people's faces when I tell them I am """someone""" because of my position at work? What society is there to care for? A plane could crash on my street and I wouldn't even bother look out the window. I'd check the news to find that 146 people have lost their lives and that we should all stand together and mourn them and that we should do everything to make sure that something like this never happens again but more importantly I'd be annoyed with all the increased traffic and people.

I wish one of you could slap me in real life. Or choke me to death, whichever would seem more appropriate in the situation.

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you wake up in ponte city, johannesburg and sit down to write your first paragraph:

>

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I had this dream and it's escaping me quickly. Do you think there would be any merit to turning it into a short story?

I'm not sure if this was earth or an entirely different planet, but the setting was post-post apocalyptic. The humanity is thriving in an industrial age but they're built on top of a ruins of a precursor civilization which technologically was incredibly advanced but aesthetically appears industrial as well, though with an entirely different set of advances from the existing species.

There are large pocket of ruins, massive complexes with unknown purpose which stretch hundreds, in some cases thousands of stories underground. A sizeable chunk of the people have made a living out of diving into these ruins to collect and sell artifacts belonging to this civilization. This is was the dream's setting, the relics were beginning to run out. Not because there were none left, but because they were mostly gathered up near the surface. Large amount of relics still remain, but they a re on the deeper, more dangerous floors, though I didn't find out what the danger was while dreaming. Perhaps environmental hazards, or still-active security systems.

The main character, which totally wasn't me, was one of these ruin divers. From what I can remember the dream started with him managing to get to the lowest floor on one of the shallower, 100 floor ruins. There he found a large empty room with a pedestal in the middle. On the pedestal there were three things: an 8-round revolver-like handgun, a single bullet with a drill shaped tip, and a basic set of instructions. The revolver was the peak of past civilization's technological development, and the instructions stated that the bullet included could be fired infinitely as the shell casing used dust to reconstruct the bullet itself. However the shell took 8 hours to regenerate between shots.

The dream ended with the main character discovering there are seven other facilities at the deepest parts of seven other ruins, each one contained a different kind of bullet.

From what I can remember, the drill bullet's functionality was that it had a high penetration power, as in it could drill through two dozen feet of steel or concrete easily, and took a large chunk of surrounding material with it, so it could be used to create impromptu exits and passages.

There was a lot more to this but unfortunately by the time I completely woke up, most of it faded. Some of the things I lost were names of the cities, ruins, past civilization, main character, and functionality of most of the other bullets.

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Which books would you recommend to a filmmaker?

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What is the greatest symbol in literary history?

Spoiler: it's the green light

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What does /lit/ think of this author? And what do you think about Jurassic Park and Westworld in particular?

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What does /lit/ think about Shadow and Claw? Have heard it's one of the best scifi books out there, but is a bit more literary and philosophical than others. I recently finished Dan Simmons' Hyperion. How does it compare?

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Stop using big words.

Stop using adjectives.

Stop using adverbs.

Stop using complex sentences.