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Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. As every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee — zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shou music.
“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-hui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”
Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now — now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and following things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.
“A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.
“However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”
“Excellent!” said Lord Wen-hui. “I have heard the words of Cook Ting and learned how to care for life!”
-Chuang Tzu
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Zhuangzi has some cool stories, my fav is the one about the pipes of man and the pipes of heaven. All men are just vessels that resonate at different frequencies as the winds of the universe blow across our gaping orifices.
Analects are harder to get into but more likely to change your life in a practical way. A secular religion (but not an atheistic religion).
Assigning these diverse collections of texts to single authors is fun, like how Borges talks about scholars in orbis tertius pass the time by assigning 1001 nights and Don Quixote to the same author and then puzzling over the authors personality. Similarly taking the bible as a continuous story, it's a much more rewarding exercise than pulling it apart.
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>>9304769
So the Zhuangzi is a text composed by multiple groups of heterodox authors over centuries. It's arrangement is due to both deliberate editing and to happenstance, misreadings, textual corruption.
Despite this the most satisfying readings are those that start with the premise that every character is significant and part of the whole, and that the arrangement on the level of sentence, paragraph, and chapter was done with God -like care and deliberation.
Similarly with the Analects. I just read a paper about how it was probably created in the Han dynasty from dozens of different sources, and has as much relation to the 6th century BC Confucius as a modern day anthology of the sayings of Robin Hood would have to an outlaw from the Middle Ages. Depressing.
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>>9304809
http://dataspace.princeton.edu/jspui/handle/88435/dsp01v692t624c
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Describe the plot of your novel.
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Very, very good. Not the best part of my book though.
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A man tries to summon his waifu through the use of a tulpa but his autism amplifies the powerlevel and his waifu becomes corporeal and goes on to found the literary movement of Memetic Sincerity. By the end she barely ever visits the man beyond the occasional visit to fulfill his sexual needs and cook him a meal or two.
It will have heavy allusions to Oedipus Rex
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a group of children undergo a series of copernican revolutions about themselves, allowing them to deconstruct and de-mythologize their nostalgic sense of topos
Is this literature?
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I liked it, so sure.
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why would you think its not?
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>>9321157
Yes.
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What are your thoughts on sex, from a philosophical viewpoint? Can non-adulterous sex be called a bad thing? I don't want this to be a >tfw thread, but I just recently broke up with my 3rd girlfriend and I'm only 22. I know people go through far more relationships than me, but I legitimately wanted each one of mine to last my entire life, and at this point I feel like I've polluted my body by bedding several different women. I'm a bit of a virtuefag. Tell me your thoughts.
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You should read Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, honestly.
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Nice blog
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>>9321120
You can't say you want a relationship to last forever and then have sex before swearing the binding oath of marriage. The two mindsets are mutually exclusive.
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If I read it all will I die?
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It will be extremely painful
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That's a big book..
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>>9321118
you're a big guy
Favorite quotes thread
>War, what is it good for? absolutely nothing. Huh!
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>What goes up, must come down.
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>Man, father. That was an Odyssey
>Yes, my son. THE Odyssey!
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What goes around, comes around.
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has /lit/ read any of the second apocalypse books by scott bakker?
the series has orcs that rape and shoot black cum, evil space aliens that rape and shoot black cum, and all sorts of other weirdness. i started reading it not too long ago and it's breddy good.
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The retard general loves it, go there if you want to discuss.
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>>9320822
>/lit/ is making fun of us again
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>>9320957
You guys are good chaps. It's just that the retard general is the best place for discussion of this.
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I need to write a 20 page essay on this text.
What should my thesis be?
>tfw brainlet
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Plato recognized and caught up the true spirit of his times, and brought it forward in a more definite way, in that he desired to make this new principle an impossibility in his Republic.
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>>9320811
That paederasty is conductive to education and that education is impossible without the loving bond of teacher and pupil in paederast love.
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Tell your prof to screw and do a more interesting dialogue. No need to add twenty more pages of refuse.
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1. He was a cuck. Themes of anti nationalism and pretty language that he probably looked up in a thesaurus to seem deep is absolute nu male bait.
2. He's pretentious. His language makes no sense. Yet people will still look down on scifi or fantasy as jokes, when they are more readable and have better plots than Shakespeare. I can already imagine the libtards who quote that when writing their cultural marxist English BA final paper about seeing their wives get fucked by BBC.
3. The plots suck. I think this one explains itself.
4. He's feminine. Who the fuck wants to read books about pretty boys? Again, bluepilled bait. No wonder (((they))) have kids read him in high school.
Have fun playing with an old fashioned medium to prove how le smart you are for tumblrina reblogs while I go have actual fun playing games.
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LOTR is better and has a cooler plot than any Shakespeare work
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gr8 b8 m8
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>>9320775
triggered?
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The very best, prove me wrong.
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not even best 19th century frenchie
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>ballsack
heyyy
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The book or the author? If the former, then I present two other books of his as not just better, but far better: Lost Illusions, and The Splendours and Miseries of a Courtesan. If the latter, then I present Leo Tolstoy as his superior.
>Balzac is good, though. Very good.
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What did you guys think of this book? Personally I enjoyed it, especially the first 50 pages. However, I do somewhat quibble with it. Parts of the prose are underwhelming and...wait. What's that smell? WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT SMELL? *sniffs air* *sweats profusely* Dare I say that our le memester john lü green is coming HOME XD from his war in iraque?
*John lü Green enter le epic room full of SHIT (hahha I said shit lol)
Green: Wait...What's that smell? what the fuck id thazwhat is that what os t hta what id that FUCKING SMELL LISA?!!!!!!"
*Jumpcut to teletubbies*
Chatting Now
GACHI de KASHIMASHI Never Ending Girls' Talk
shuugyou CHAIMU made matenai
chikoku wa shite mo soutai wa Non Non Non!
seiippai Study After School
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you actually fooled me with this one - I kept reading, not thinking there would be a surprise, convinced of some literary rube, and I got yukked!
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was that supposed to be a Pynchon imitation? was shite
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BEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAHHHHHFFFPPPPPPPPPPPPPP
Anonymous
What is the thinking mans fetish? 2017-03-31 10:43:19 Post No.9320525
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What is the thinking mans fetish? 2017-03-31 10:43:19 Post No.9320525
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What is the thinking mans fetish?
Anonymous
2017-03-31 10:43:19
Post No. 9320525
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_and_scatology
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>>9320525
my diary desu
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>>9320525
We have this joke in Brazil that roughly translates to "Fucking curious men in the ass".
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Thinking men don't have fetishes.
Asexuality is for patricians.
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Irony has gone too far.
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go back there
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>>9320519
go back there
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Not really.
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What is the best place to learn spanish grammar that isn't the 1k manual de la real academia de lengua española.
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Spain or any of the spanish speaking countries
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>>9320515
spanish is already my native language anon.
best edition of pic related ? Norton/Oxford/Penguin/something else? I want good notes and introduction and so on.
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>Paradife Loft
Maybe get an edition with fewer typos
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>>9320346
please be bait
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>>9320355
I confeſs, I was not ſerious.