/lit/ - Literature

>>11298588
I'm in

>“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself. This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.”
Is this true?

If you want to kill yourself, why don’t you want to kill
yourself?
Now’s your chance! I, who greatly love both death and life,
Would kill myself too, if I dared kill myself...
If you dare, then be daring!
What good to you is the changing picture of outer images
We call the world?
What good is this cinema of hours played out
By actors with stock roles and gestures,
This colorful circus of our never-ending drive to keep going?
What good is your inner world which you don’t know?
Kill yourself, and maybe you’ll finally know it...
End it all, and maybe you’ll begin...
If you’re weary of existing, at least
Be noble in your weariness,
And don’t, like me, sing of life because you’re drunk,
Don’t, like me, salute death through literature!

You’re needed? O futile shadow called man!
No one is needed; you’re not needed by anyone...
Without you everything will keep going without you.
Perhaps it’s worse for others that you live than if you kill
yourself . . .
Perhaps your presence is more burdensome than your
absence . . .

Other people’s grief? You’re worried
About them crying over you?
Don’t worry: they won’t cry for long . . .
The impulse to live gradually stanches tears
When they’re not for our own sake,
When they’re because of what happened to someone else,
especially death,
Since after this happens to someone, nothing else will...

First there’s anxiety, the surprise of mystery’s arrival
And of your spoken life’s sudden absence...
Then there’s the horror of your visible and material coffin,
And the men in black whose profession is to be there.
Then the attending family, heartbroken and telling jokes,
Mourning between the latest news from the evening papers,
Mingling grief over your death with the latest crime...
And you merely the incidental cause of that lamentation,
You who will be truly dead, much deader than you
imagine...
Much deader down here than you imagine,
Even if in the beyond you may be much more alive...

Next comes the black procession to the vault or grave,
And finally the beginning of the death of your memory.
At first everyone feels relieved
That the slightly irksome tragedy of your death is over...
Then, with each passing day, the conversation lightens up
And life falls back into its old routine...

Then you are slowly forgotten.
You’re remembered only twice a year:
On you birthday and your death day.
That’s it. That’s all. That’s absolutely all.
Two times a year they think about you.
Two times a year those who loved you heave a sigh,
And they may sigh on the rare occasions someone mentions
your name.

Look at yourself in the face and honestly face what we are...