Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 2720. page

>Alpinism is the art of climbing mountains by confronting the greatest dangers with the greatest prudence. Art is used here to mean the accomplishment of knowledge in action.
>You cannot always stay on the summits. You have to come down again...
>So what’s the point? Only this: what is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above. While climbing, take note of all the difficulties along your path. During the descent, you will no longer see them, but you will know that they are there if you have observed carefully.
>There is an art to finding your way in the lower regions by the memory of what you have seen when you were higher up. When you can no longer see, you can at least still know. . .

René Daumal (Mount Analogue)

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Maybe it's not metaphysics. Maybe it's existential. I'm talking about the individual US citizen's deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we've lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it's all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it's not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than "die," "pass away," the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday--... And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have pour in to make sure we're remembered, these'll last what-- a hundred years? two hundred?-- and they'll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I'm cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and that before maybe three of four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1864, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine, in fact, probably that's why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are... The post-production capitalist has something to do with the death of civics. But so does fear of smallness and death and everything being on fire.

Fight Club

The 120 Days of Sodom

>>8621958
>>8621972
Come on niggers be serious about this shit

cool

genesis is such a qt

i kinda wonder if they had sex at some point

>>8621893
Maybe. Idk if genesis was into boypussy but burroughs was.

>>8621856
Start with middle school or high school level books and work your way up.
Some books to start with that I read in high school or middle school;
Catcher in the Rye
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
To Kill a Mockingbird
Shakespeare
Hemingway
Dostoevsky (best read in chronological order)
Melville
Brave New World
1984 + Animal Farm
The Great Gatsby
Heart of Darkness
Lord of the Flies
Steinbeck
Cormac Mccarthy (Blood Meridian was in college)
The Jungle
Many read Rand at this point and so did I but I hated her, Atlas Shrugged was one of two books that I quit reading and never revisited, The Fountainhead was more readable.

>>8621871
I was looking into starting with Dostoyevsky. Should I start with Crime and Punishment? Does it really matter which translation I choose? I found one from R. Pevear's translation.

>>8621877
Notes From Underground (it's short and sweet) then Crime and Punishment is the best to start with Dosto, although most students only read Crime and Punishment so it's no great loss if you skip Notes for a while. I don't know about translations because I usually read the one that's in the library.

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>>8621817
Great.

>>8621817
>wants to be great writer
>let student debt accrue to travel and spend time writing
>risk future to become great or justify cynicism

>tfw can't make music anymore and have gone into a medical field to make money
feels bad man

Don't
Don't

>>8621775
Great characters. Best antagonist in literature if I am to be honest.

Only started reading it. Lack of quotation marks is a bit confusing at first but I'll get used to it

No Ligotti readers?

I thought he was /lit/'s favourite writer of horror short stories.

>>8621730
Our Temporary Supervisor

Teatro Grottesco is great for more abstract, "philosophical" horror that exists in its own strange reality, while his earlier books like Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe are slightly more standard horror stories with glimpses of stranger elements that would became more pronounced in his work over the years. All of his major books other than Noctuary are still in print, so just pick up whatever you can find.

also that photo is of Jean Cocteau.

>>8621667
>For more than a dozen years, I recommended the poet and musician for the honor
No means no. Gordon Ball literally raped the Nobel prize.

booms pls die

>Examining prize criteria, I learned that Alfred Nobel’s 1895 will specified that in literature the work must be “the most outstanding ... of an idealistic tendency
>idealistic
Wrong! Wrong! Ideal means ideal not idealistic.
W

Be careful with it. As with many things like this, it is filled with cultists and charisma worshipers. After a while you really can see it's a few VERY distinct types of people who are attracted to these kinds of things, all unusually given to worshiping guru figures.

As a result it's also full of bullshit and overstatement. And I'm not saying this from a le reddit atheism/scientism perspective, but as someone who actually likes this stuff.

>>8621657
Well it's either that or pot, and I don't have the resources to redily purchase ounces of the stuff.

The Mind Illuminated

It s Huysmans style you moron. Really heavy and complicated sentences but it s a delight to read, in french at least. The story and all the anecdotes are not for everyone but it s not the most important. The atmosphere is fantastic

What is it with plebs and this particular book ? Kids hoping for some macabre bs ? In a Huysmans book ?

>>8621943
>>8621939
Everything the characters talk about is "hurrrrr I communicated with the dead, there's a succubus in the church I go to! rub some roots on a kid when they're young and they won't feel cold when they grow up! ohhhhhh! you can't explain things with science so therefor superstition is all we can rely on ohhhhhhh! astrology is real you guys honest! alchemy is real! the world was so much better in the middle ages because everyone was more pias! mmmmmmmmm!!!!! ugggggggggh!"

kill me and also take my life

>>8621600
Das means schopi & neetzsch?

das not decisive yet but freud's on top. so I'm reading freud. so far very exciting: i you want to quote Vergil on the vengeful dido but cannot remember the aliqui word it means that your girlfriend is preggers (no liquid = she's not getting her period) and you want her to go die in a pyre (such aeneas).

Were fucked. I should have stuck with genre fiction books. At least then I wasn't incredibly depressed and devoid of all positive emotion.

Hust stop thinking about stuff/caring.

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Look at pic related maahn.

Also finding God might help.

>>8621582
Naked Lunch, mate. have fun.

pale fire ofc
easy the best of these 4, especially if you like poetry

>Critique of Pure Reason
>War & Peace
>Early Writings (Marx, Penguin Classics)

Ask yourself why you go against the grain of the degenerative status quo and begin a lifelong spiritual quest to find the Archimedean point from which you can move the world

>>8621562
yes, but which archimedian point
and what
something like a "stand for something or you'll fall for anything" is decent enough, but there are so many irrefutable conclusions that i'm overwhelmed

do i become a catholic right wing gun toting white stormfag or a left wing secretly commie cuck?

i feel like j alfred prufrock and i don't want to be that over referenced indecisive son of a bitch

>>8621566
>Commie
>Cuck
Become a conservative classcuck :)

I hear a lot of Bakhtin stuff is about to be translated/published in English for the first time?

>>8621563
Really? That's great for you. Are they translating all volumes, and if so, are they translating Losev?

>>8621544

Bely is probably the best obscure Russian writer ever. Petersburg was really cool to read.