Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 257. page

Also the first two chapters are just pure boring exposition.

What then, did you think of Asimov's Foundation books?

>>9943203
the exposition is key for the book to make sense

On just such a day I was once out grouse-shooting in the Tchern district of the province of Tula. I started and shot a fair amount of game; my full game-bag cut my shoulder mercilessly;
but already the evening glow had faded, and the cool shades of twilight were beginning to grow thicker, and to spread across the sky, which was still bright, though no longer lighted up by the rays of the setting sun, when I at last decided to turn back homewards. With swift steps I passed through the long ‘square’ of underwoods, clambered up a hill, and instead of the familiar plain I expected to see, with the oakwood on the right and the little white church in the distance, I saw before me a scene completely different, and quite new to me. A narrow valley lay at my feet, and directly facing me a dense wood of aspen-trees rose up like a thick wall. I stood still in perplexity, looked round me. . . . ‘Aha!’ I thought, ‘I have somehow come wrong; I kept too much to the right,’ and surprised at my own mistake, I rapidly descended the hill. I was at once plunged into a disagreeable clinging mist, exactly as though I had gone down into a cellar; the thick high grass at the bottom of the valley, all drenched with dew, was white like a smooth tablecloth; one felt afraid somehow to walk on it. I made haste to get on the other side, and walked along beside the aspenwood, bearing to the left. Bats were already hovering over its slumbering tree-tops, mysteriously flitting and quivering across the clear obscure of the sky; a young belated hawk flew in swift, straight course upwards, hastening to its nest. ‘Here, directly I get to this corner,’ I thought to myself, ‘I shall find the road at once; but I have come a mile out of my way!’
I did at last reach the end of the wood, but there was no road of any sort there; some kind of low bushes overgrown with long grass extended far and wide before me; behind them in the far, far distance could be discerned a tract of waste land. I stopped again. ‘Well? Where am I?’ I began ransacking my brain to recall how and where I had been walking during the day. . . . ‘Ah! but these are the bushes at Parahin,’ I cried at last; ‘of course! then this must be Sindyev wood. But how did I get here? So far? . . . Strange! Now I must bear to the right again.’

I went to the right through the bushes. Meantime the night had crept close and grown up like a storm-cloud; it seemed as though, with the mists of evening, darkness was rising up on all sides and flowing down from overhead. I had come upon some sort of little, untrodden, overgrown path; I walked along it, gazing intently before me. Soon all was blackness and silence around — only the quail’s cry was heard from time to time. Some small night-bird, flitting noiselessly near the ground on its soft wings, almost flapped against me and skurried away in alarm. I came out on the further side of the bushes, and made my way along a field by the hedge. By now I could hardly make out distant objects; the field showed dimly white around; beyond it rose up a sullen darkness, which seemed moving up closer in huge masses every instant. My steps gave a muffled sound in the air, that grew colder and colder. The pale sky began again to grow blue — but it was the blue of night. The tiny stars glimmered and twinkled in it.
What I had been taking for a wood turned out to be a dark round hillock. ‘But where am I, then?’ I repeated again aloud, standing still for the third time and looking inquiringly at my spot and tan English dog, Dianka by name, certainly the most intelligent of four-footed creatures. But the most intelligent of four-footed creatures only wagged her tail, blinked her weary eyes dejectedly, and gave me no sensible advice. I felt myself disgraced in her eyes and pushed desperately forward, as though I had suddenly guessed which way I ought to go; I scaled the hill, and found myself in a hollow of no great depth, ploughed round.

A strange sensation came over me at once. This hollow had the form of an almost perfect cauldron, with sloping sides; at the bottom of it were some great white stones standing upright — it seemed as though they had crept there for some secret council — and it was so still and dark in it, so dreary and weird seemed the sky, overhanging it, that my heart sank. Some little animal was whining feebly and piteously among the stones. I made haste to get out again on to the hillock. Till then I had not quite given up all hope of finding the way home; but at this point I finally decided that I was utterly lost, and without any further attempt to make out the surrounding objects, which were almost completely plunged in darkness, I walked straight forward, by the aid of the stars, at random. . . . For about half-an-hour I walked on in this way, though I could hardly move one leg before the other. It seemed as if I had never been in such a deserted country in my life; nowhere was there the glimmer of a fire, nowhere a sound to be heard. One sloping hillside followed another; fields stretched endlessly upon fields; bushes seemed to spring up out of the earth under my very nose. I kept walking and was just making up my mind to lie down somewhere till morning, when suddenly I found myself on the edge of a horrible precipice.
I quickly drew back my lifted foot, and through the almost opaque darkness I saw far below me a vast plain. A long river skirted it in a semi-circle, turned away from me; its course was marked by the steely reflection of the water still faintly glimmering here and there. The hill on which I found myself terminated abruptly in an almost overhanging precipice, whose gigantic profile stood out black against the dark-blue waste of sky, and directly below me, in the corner formed by this precipice and the plain near the river, which was there a dark, motionless mirror, under the lee of the hill, two fires side by side were smoking and throwing up red flames. People were stirring round them, shadows hovered, and sometimes the front of a little curly head was lighted up by the glow.
I found out at last where I had got to. This plain was well known in our parts under the name of Byezhin Prairie. . . . But there was no possibility of returning home, especially at night; my legs were sinking under me from weariness. I decided to get down to the fires and to wait for the dawn in the company of these men, whom I took for drovers. I got down successfully, but I had hardly let go of the last branch I had grasped, when suddenly two large shaggy white dogs rushed angrily barking upon me. The sound of ringing boyish voices came from round the fires; two or three boys quickly got up from the ground. I called back in response to their shouts of inquiry. They ran up to me, and at once called off the dogs, who were specially struck by the appearance of my Dianka. I came down to them.

you should realize that when fat guys complain about stuff online, it's almost 99% rationalization.

What happens is that the gestalt work fails to make them star struck, so they start nit picking.

I swear it's like that. Beyond a certain level, I mean.

You could bitch that there's no reason for Hamlet not to immediately kill Claudius and call it a major plot hole or some gay shit. But no one does. Cause the execution surpassed gay nerd complaints.

The same is true for cliches. If you pull em off well enough, no one will complain.

Also, if it's really not working, just make the double life thing just a red herring and come up with something more interesting. There's an edit button nigga

>>9934774
that cat looks like nietzsche

>>9934774
What's the problem?
Apart from...
>Serial killer
>murder thriller
YAAAWN

What is time to you?

What interests me is that "Time" is actually 2 different things, a phenomenon, and a completely arbitrary and unrelated system of "measuring" the phenomenon.

>>9934765
time is real, but it's not linear. It's a dot. It's all happening at exactly the same moment.

Yes absolutely

>>9943048
>atheist
>reading with an open mind

>>9943048
Sure

I'm going to look at things in the meta way, but then I'm going to get conscious about it and joke it off.

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>>9934692
I saw this meme for the first time today.

Growing a brain.

>>9942997
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism/
I can see how I'd you've never heard of thought of the problem of universals that it wouldn't make sense. Instead of reading that maybe look at the world of Ideas or Forms.

>>9942997
>tfw you just realized you're a brainlet
enjoy being mediocre ad infinitum

Bertrand Russell is awful. You're probably doing yourself for harm by reading him because he gets so much shit wrong, especially with Nietzsche. At the very least ignore anything he has to say about any medieval philosopher.

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>>9934629
You may start with his texts about the body (Elements of Philosophy, The First Section, Concerning Body) and only then read the Leviathan.
The gimmick there is to understand a bit more deeply his materialism and why it is so important ti construct arguments about sensation, passions, politics, violence and power.

>I want to study as much as possible the political philosophy of Hobbes

Why?

>>9934811
Thank you!

What about Schmitt or Strauss?

>>9934818
Cause Russian presidential election comin soon
I will not vote, but I wanna know more about the nature of power

We do not even know who Vladimir Putin is


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49dh-3hA6Us

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>>9942829
Maybe it's better without spaces idk

Maybe you should read poetry before trying to write poetry. This is fucking awful

>>9942847


I've read a lot of poetry bbut ok. I just have a different style of writing. I don't like all the literal stuff. I'm a free writer

Why did philosophy go full retard during the Enlightenment? No wonder Nietzsche was able to pants them all so easily, they basically set themselves up to be pranked by the Romantics.

>>9934622
WOOOOOO

>He hid in dark alleyways and revealed his ass to women walking by. “What they saw was not the obscene thing, I never even thought of that, it was the ridiculous thing,” he wrote. The “obscene thing” was his penis, the “ridiculous thing,” his bare-ass. As a child, Rousseau was sometimes spanked by his 30-year-old caretaker, Mademoiselle de Lambercier. It gave him great delight. It sexually aroused him; throughout his life, he tried with all his might to relive the experience, hence the mooning. He loved to be spanked. He craved a powerful, punishing mother. (Rousseau’s own mother died weeks after his birth.) He would later have sex with a woman he obsessed over for many years: Rousseau called this lover “maman,” and he was “her little one.”

I have a hard time taking Debord seriously after reading a little about his "dérive" idea or whatever. "Walk around the city with some mates and then talk to some other mates who also walked around the city about how you felt!"

>>9934573

Do don't need to know much. One chapter of it is about the Russian revolution and how it became counter-revolutionary so a familiarity with the events of that along with a sense of common Marxist terminology might help you get that chapter more.

That chapter is not vital to understanding the book as a whole though, I get the sense that it was written more in response to the fact that people would naturally question as to how his ideas applied to the Soviet Union.

It is a dense read but is not very long. If you don't get something don't feel bad about rereading it. It's an interesting viewpoint that is worth understanding regardless of your political views. Debords ideas and many right-wing commentators critical of consumerism/modernity often express the same ideas in different terms.

>>9934591

>t. brainlet

>>9934573

You basically want two things: you want to be conversant in 19th & 20th European history up to Debord's time, and you want to be acquainted with Marxist terminology like the other anon said, /especially/ with basic ideas laid out in Capital V. I. For example, after the first section where he lays out his basic "dude spectacles lmao" framing theme, the very next (second) section, where he actually gets into cases, the meat of things, is entitled /The Commodity as Spectacle/. I am not a Debord pro but I feel very confident in saying that the reason why he ordered the text in this way is exactly because Marx starts out Capital, before anything else, by talking about the commodity. So he's aping Marx on purpose with this editorial choice. So Debord basically accepts and discusses Marxist categories at length and makes them fold into his new thing.

>shoots his wife in the head
What did he mean by this?

>>9943227
nothin personnel, kid.

>>9943245
*let's friends rape his kid*
How can he keep getting away with this?

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>>9934561
>the foxy spirits
>the ghost waifus
>the stir-fry dildo
OH YES

>>9934565
>stir fry dildo
That is a new one

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don't judge me

Now I want to know what the photo was.

>>9942561
>ASOIAF
Flaying
Jk
>>three musketeers
Which part? That one with the king?

>>9942760
Don't you remember the part where D'Artagnan has to put on a dress to escape? I always wanted to be him in that scene.

>>9942561
The Bible turned me gay