Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 3854. page

Discourses, Meditations, Enchiridion. Stoic authors in general

>>8021371
Spend enough time with them/ attempt to befriend them and youll soon find out whether they are spooks or part of your own desires

>>8022339
what is the best version of meditations?

>>8021352
Epictetus' Discourses, and Aristotle's Ethics; together they are basically the intellectual, yet realistic guiding father you never had growing up.

Zorba the Greek both inspired me to begin reading lit and philosophy and to notice and try to dial down my narcissistic shyness.

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OP start and bump

The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff

My babbie's first book introduction to Taoism, would later read the Dao De Ching.

Remember reading this in a day and feeling a sense of peace and happiness for the first time in years, with a new perspective on all my problems. Sensation has since washed away and I'm trying to reclaim it but still grateful for reading this.

Didn't appriciate the rant chapters about 3/4 in, even less so in the Te of Piglet (which I put down) but willing to overlook. Now I think Hoff's ranting as such goes against Tao principle and he should just shut up but that's my interpretation.

Would like to read up to Time and Being by Heidegger at some point but heard it's hard as fuck

>>8021370
>narcissitic shyness

More on that please, what do you mean?

I never hear philip roth on /lit/, but he's jewish

>>8021360
He's also not obscure

>>8021369
neither is McElroy, Gass, or Hawkes

>falling for le experimental minimalism meme

off yourself pseud faggot

>>8021261
>taking obvious b8

You're already dead inside desu

>>8021246
I like her earrings

You forgot best Chilean

>>8022609

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

>>8021183
Best Roman: Virgil

How often do liberals, SJWs and tumblrinas read stuff that disagrees with them without resorting to namecalling, demanding safe spaces, and demanding an end to free speech by calling it hate speech?

>>8021173
It's fine if I'm reading something like Aristotle or Nietzsche or whatever, but reading for example the newspaper makes me break stuff so I tend to refrain from that.

>>8021194
Op included the word "bigot", implying the question was directed both ways.

Corncob McCarthy is good.

>>8021099
Pinecone

Donald Ray Pollock

>>8021026

>i, clavdius
>robert graves

>i, robert
>tiberius claudius caesar augustus germanicus

>>8021026
both

>>8021040

It's I, clavdivs you pleb

k
y
s
m
m

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>>8020938
W-why, Anonymous, I didn't know you felt that way about me! *kysses back with passion and gusto*

Mmm. That feels nice. *puts my hand on your inner leg*

>>8020949
IF YOU PURPOSEFULLY MISUDNERSTAND ME LE ONE MORE LE TIME I LE SWAER I WILL KILLLLLLLL YURUYITROTYOTOTO AHHHAHQHAHHAHHHC
X
DX
DX
DX
DX
DD
X

yes. If you haven't sorted out your life by 25 your life is objectively over. The dye has been cast and is too ingrained by now to be reversed
You have a future of drudgery ahead of you i'm afraid

>>8020894

>If you haven't sorted out your life by 25 your life is objectively over. The dye has been cast and is too ingrained by now to be reversed.

Expand on this, please.

>>8020900
speaks for itself. If you don't get it when said basically, you won't get it when expanded on

Still incomplete

I turn my head around and see behind
a barrage of uncounted centuries
congesting in their endless file the course
of history, pages of the almanac,
extending to the furthest reaches of
recorded time, where paper frays and frames
the forms of kings, and mounds of plebeian dust
ride the backwards-floating wind of time.

In the primal bush in golden sunshine robed,
perspiring blackened topsoil underneath
to cool the crib, the little feet of lizards
now long returned to loam and dirt would drag
their little bellies through the oozing mud
and scrawl across the land in scurried streaks
a city in relief embossed in dirt,
winding its ways through the swaying tallgrass,

until the primal simian learned that if
he tucked his throbbing thumb against the rock
cupped in his foregathered dactyls, it would
repel the haul of gravity and taste
the glassy higher air unsullied still
by smoke and breath, and fly to where it pleased
him that it fly to hammer muck from meat
and speckle red his ragged face through art of

slaughter. The blood of grassland peasantry
made flush the lining of the arteries
that plotted lines awry about his face,
and on his temple set a bony crown,
and fed the marrows of his kingly bones;
the bulbous mouth, the downy cheeks, the squat
phallus resting in its matted nest, like
the monkey-king upon his fleshly throne.

Of morbid curiosity I chase
with eyes the lives of my progenitor,
and deep within my chest the drum begins
to beat at sight of savagery to match
the savagery forever etched upon
my cardiac wall. What in me is human,
whatever masculine, testosterone
trails afire, descended the lines from him.

But what in me is human had been boiled
and fused together in bubbling womb-water:
the primal male had swum towards the female
and had cocooned himself within her, sharing
blood and spirit to build a progeny, like
the baby hominid that stood just slightly
taller than his hulking parents and shuffled
around the shelter that his mother built him.

Giotto’s Campanile Beckons

With a pounding heart I lie in my bed,
Thinking of any possible way
To end myself in my dark and empty room,

I look through my drawer
And try to discern if the quantity of eliquid in my possession
Is enough to stop my heart,
The bathroom is calling me,
I will lie on the tiled floor and rub
The sweet glycerine nectar all over my nubile torso
And hope for a speedy demise,
I hope that I don’t experience the unpleasantness of vomiting,
For my stomach is filled with the oily pastas of the mensa,
I scrounge the interwebs for the symptoms of nicotine overdose,
The experience sounds rather miserable,

Perhaps there’s another way,

Maybe I’ll stroll on down to the stairwell
At the end of the hall,
And figure out a way to position my body
So that I land on my head
Upon my ultimate plop,

Is it true?
Do you pass out before you reach the ground?
Or will my last experience
Be marked by unfathomable pain?

Oh God!
I hope that I don’t survive!
Three floors plus the basement,
Then the smooth comfort of the cold marble floor,
The ultimate peace,
But is the distance adequate?

Ah, the possibility of survival is too high,
The odds are in my favor,
But stranger things have happened,

I can not withstand the humiliation of survival,
I can not look into the pitiful faces of
Those that once loved me,
After they find out what I wanted to do to them,
Will they be offended or filled with pity
At the thought that I cared so little for them?

Perhaps I’ll suffocate myself,

I place the long-sleve of my newly received
Class of 2019 T-shirt over my mouth and nose,
Then I hold my breath to the gentle tune of
A Sunny Day in Glasgow,

These moaning choruses suit my death well,
The pain increases as my brain pleads for O2,
My heart makes its last attempts to fuel me
And then begins to slow,
On the verge of passing out I realize,
That after I pass out
My body will automatically begin breathing again,
In a passive state where I am not its sovereign,
And I will only awake with mild brain damage,
This effort is futile,

I am a coward,
I don’t have the adequate means to stop
The endless murmurings of my consciousness,
I want to stop completely but the
Margin for error is too wide,

I look out of my small third story window,
Along the horizon I spot the Campanile,
Like a great Gothic antenna
The tower beckons to me with open arms,
Spread wide as the arms of our
Archaic Judean savior,
Perhaps he is my savior after all,

If only there were midnight tourist climbs
To the apex of the famed tower,
What a view that would be,
A perfect panorama
For the closing shot of my miserable narrative,

>>8021398
Part II:

Tomorrow I will avoid my usual actions,
Upon my rising from this cursed bed
I will go straight to Giotto’s Campanile,

I fear that I will not finish the meditative march
Up its winding marble stairs,
The fear will exponentially grow as I ascend,
The faces of those that
I am about to cause distress
Are mentally projected on the stone walls
Surrounding the staircase,
WIll I become a suffering tomato
Upon the final plop?

Not a chance,
This plan is foolproof,
My greatest fear is that when I rise
And enter the breeze of the Florentine morn,
My decision will be postponed once again,
I will no longer be thinking rationally,

I will go on and suffer,
As I did every day before this dreadful night,
I will go through my usual motions,
I will act for those that require my acting,
I will attempt just as hard as I did in my prior days
To care,

To feel affection,
To feel empathy,
To care if any of my fellow flesh-sacks
Cease to exist,

Sometimes I get a glimpse into
Some sort of emotion and I wonder,
Do they all feel this way
All of the time?

Oh, how I envy them!
When I am touched by the smallest
Drop of true affection I revel,
I feel like a real person,
I feel that at least something in
This dreadful place has just
The slightest semblance of significance.

In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.

is this worth reading? i was wondering..

>>8020844
Yes, it is worth reading.

kill yourself

no, your autism cost you a job.

>>8020397
rude

>>8020253
Don't be a tard on the multiple choice; don't spend all your time writing your thesis; make sure you answer the prompt; don't bother being particularly poignant; lastly, on the rhetorical analysis essay, which, I've noticed, is what students have the hardest time on, instead of just listing off rhetorical devices and strategies, always--ALWAYS--provide an actual analysis.

>>8020253
Don't show up

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>>8020296
Thanks bro! how did you do on it before?

she cute

it's a shame all poems are bad

Medieval.

>>8020241
the bifurcated middle