/lit/ - Literature

>>22848531
Ooooo, permanent additions to a physical library? This is an undertaking of the utmost severity. It depends heavily on your own tastes, but I will share some of my beloved recs with you anon, in the spirit of Christmas. I'll start with the obvious just in case and go from there.

>Canon
The Holy Bible; KJV or NASB 1995
Plato; complete works
Aristotle; complete works
Hesiod; Theogony; Loeb edition
Homer; Illiad; Lattimore translation
Homer; Odyssey; no favorite translation yet
Aeschylus; complete works
Horace; complete works
Plutarch; Lives
Shakespeare; A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, King Lear, Julius Caesar, and whatever else you like (although I would freely recommend his complete works, I think purchasing individually makes more sense here)
Geoffrey Chaucer; Canterbury Tales & Romaunt of the Rose
John Milton; Paradise Lost
William Blake; Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience

>Other
Anthony Trollope; Doctor Thorne and Christmas at Thompson Hall
Ishiguro, Kazuo; Remains of the Day
Jane Austen; Pride and Prejudice & Sense and Sensibility
W.B. Yeats; A volume of his poetry and Rosa Alchemica, if you can find it
Sappho; One Hundred Lyrics; Bliss Carmen is translator
D.H. Lawrence; some collection of his poems
T.S. Eliot; some collection of his poems and criticism
John Keats; Endymion
William Barret; Irrational Man
E.B. White; Essays
Sir Thomas Heath; Ancient Greek Mathematics, Vols. I & II
Beckmann; A History of Pi
Bertrand Russell; An Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy
Graham Priest; A Very Short Introduction to Logic

>Children's for Adults!
J.R.R. Tolkien; The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion (Silmarillion is my favorite)
C.S. Lewis; The Chronicles of Narnia (the first book and the last book are my favorite)
Richard Adams; Watership Down
Mary Macleod; King Arthur and His Noble Knights
Beatrice Potter; Peter Rabbit, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle (All of her stories are wholesome and comfy.)
Jack London; Call of the Wild and White Fang

>Christian, because it is Christ-mas!
C.S. Lewis; Weight of Glory
Oswald Chambers; My Utmost for His Highest
Andrew Murray; Absolute Surrender
Jack Deere; Surprised by the Power of the Spirit

I don't know, honestly, making recs is hard. I can think of too many books and have a difficult time limiting myself. Your age being an unknown also makes it a bit difficult. I might rec different than I have, but oh well.

>>21361645
>>21363267
These are me, but I'm reviving the thread. I need more haiku!!!

Bright, awaited star
beaming over Bethlehem -
Christ, like a bud, blooms!

Coffee each morning
staining my insides rich brown
matches my outsides

Wet flakes weave slick slivers.
The windborne blades lithely slice
Winter's winding winds.

A resounding tweet,
yet not a bird's whistled chirp.
Billionaire at home -

Quavering spirit - flame
burning bright; selennial!
Abound! Boundless, rise!

What are some good editions of Duns Scotus' original text in English aside from the Hackett? More specifically, I'm trying to find an edition of the Ordinatio in English but it almost seems like there isn't one. That's not really possible, r-right?

I'm ethnically Syrian but I was born and raised in Germany. My Arab ancestry mixed with my German upbringing makes me feel alien all the time.
I have naturally and subconsciously distanced myself from everything related to my arabic side growing up. I used to be quite fluent in Arabic when I was a little kid but that was mostly because I was regularly talking to children of other Arab families. I used to regularly visit my relatives in Syria before the war in 2011. I loved drinking traditional mate and eating hot salted corn on the cob. Playing with the kids at the parking lot. Going to the corner store that was run by an old sweet lady on a wheelchair. Smelling the gas of motor bikes passing by. Buying toy guns and pretending to be in a war, not realizing that the inevitable was soon to come, this time for real.
My brothers and I used to fight over who gets to sleep on the king sized bed. My frens, believe me when I tell you that it was the comfiest bed to ever rest my little preadolescent body on. Oh how I slept like an angel next to my grandma.
My grandpa was a high school teacher for philosophy. I remember walking into his room and being overwhelmed by his massive shelves every single time. I did not dare laying a finger upon those books. He was kind of reserved, didn't initiate conversations, much like me. In fact after his death two years ago my mom kept telling me how much I remind her of him. How he too had long hair, a quiet character and a determination to pursue knowledge and wisdom through philosophy and religion. As a muslim she's proud of the fact that despite reading all of these philosophy books my grandpa still "returned" to Islam. She hopes that one day I'll follow his path and leave my atheism behind. That I'm not so sure of.
All of those things plus the fact that the terror in the middle east is unlikely to come to an end makes me feel ashamed for being so withdrawn from Arab culture, despite all of its negative aspects. Communicating with my mom is hard because my Arabic is horrible, I keep stuttering and forgetting so many words. Thankfully her German is ok so I can resort to that when needed, but talking to relatives whose German sucks is a nightmare. Makes me feel so guilty, especially because all of my siblings speak it so much better.

>>18165447
slavoj zizek - violence

>>14046292
They're great. I don't like it when artists try too hard to make them look like oils but when they're used to their strengths they take on a shine of their own.

>>11173677
Mimesis; Auerbach
Song of the Wandering Aengus; W.B. Yeats

I try to meditate at least 30 minutes a day. My ultimate goal is to improve my focus and short term memory. I've come to understand meditation in quite a few different ways in the short time I've been doing which I would love to share with all of you. I think one of biggest reasons I have such an issue focusing is because of how pervasive instant gratification is in our culture. Of course everyone here knows this but I'm not sure its commonly understood how far this reaches. Do you ever pick up your phone or open your browser without KNOWING what you wanted to do? It's a pretty destructive habit that I've noticed among a lot of people. You open your phone and you press some buttons and then decide to check snapchat or something. What this does long term is condition you to not think about things in a constructive way.


Meditating I realized that as close as you can bring yourself to pure silence of mind is the closest to truth you can come. This is really the goal I have with meditation, to perceive silence and hold it as long as you can. All that noise in your head is analogues to your values, thoughts, and feelings of reality. But that silence is analogues to truth, what reality and the universe ACTUALLY sound like. Everyone who wants to explore the question of the nature of truth value needs to understand that all value and meaning is born out of this silence and nothingness of the universe.


The difficulty of holding this silence should really alarm anyone who tries to meditate. Your thoughts are firing automatic and have been firing automatic all day every day your entire life. To meditate is to put your mind in a place that it has never been. When you meditate you realize that thinking is so easy that so much of it is in this category, so one has to ask, where do I draw the line between automatic thoughts and things which I personally deliberated?

This is the only thing we want in life. What's the point of reading?

I've done acid 5 times, 2 of which were as successful as follows and 3 of which weren't bad but weren't really noteworthy in any way. I really credit it with taking me as close as I've ever been to resolving many of my issues and insecurities with existence, reality, and society and such. For as long as I can remember I've had, not nearly as much anymore, an anxiety prevailing the idea of creating art. I'm not entirely sure why this anxiety exists but it basically is reduced to the fact that creating art makes zero sense to me and I in no way am capable of wrapping my head around its process. In my worst midst of this mindset I felt alien to all art, criticizing things like sitting in movie theaters or going to art galleries because I would reduce it to something that it wasn't.
Anyways I always try to enter my trips with these conflicts in my mind so I can see if a new perspective is to be gained from the experience and oh man. Once I did acid all my insecurity and anxiety about art disappeared, suddenly something that had never made any sense to me was completely understood. In fact the one thing I didn't understand was how I didn't understand it before. I felt a deep reverence for every artist that had ever created something, a reflection of their individuality and a partaking in a process that as a human i had a right to as well. It may be hard for someone reading this to understand my specific anxiety but you have to understand that the very encounter with art made me anxious and confused.
Though i lost this perspective once i was off my trips I see it as a goal to accomplish through my other trips, when I think I will be better suited and more ready to carry such an understanding away in my waking life.
I really would recommend acid to anyone who possesses strength of will and a moderate self-awareness. I was capable of stopping my trips from becoming bad based on the little reading I did of Marcus Aurelius. If you're nervous about doing it you should realize that that is a completely normal part about trying something as new and unparalleled in experience as psychedelics.

>>10060700
Where did Nabokov warn of this? Genuinely curious.

What're some good books to learn English grammar from?

>>9009603
well, i appreciate you narrowing it down at least.

to cast a wider net, i'm looking for something like "the immoralist" but not about fucking african boys on one's honeymoon; like mishima but not gay.

what was the most erotic thing you've ever read, and how did it reach you and impact you?

What are some works I can read that can rationalize/justify sexual attraction? I've reached the point that I think attraction to someone really amounts to nothing. I find it hard to understand how so many poets wrote about beauty and such when its really such a base thing. Think about it this way: when you are attracted to a qt and want to go and talk to her what more are you doing than being strung by urges way beyond your control. Someone could argue that these urges are good since they bring us closer together but I would counter by saying that they also do a lot of harm to those who weren't fortunate in the gene-pool lottery. Before someone brings it up I don't consider myself a bad looking guy and have had several girlfriends. I just don't know what to do about the fact that every time a girl falls for me if I'm not attracted to her I hurt her. Do you guys ever feel the same? Any philosophers/books that can help me see the possible good in attraction?

>Previous:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — Joyce
The Sword in the Stone — T.H. White
>Current:
Today I Wrote Nothing — Daniil Kharms
Bulfinch's Mythology
The Great Divide — Peter Watson
>Next:
Keats' poetry and letters
toss-up between Wolfe's BotNS or Blood Meridian
my father-in-law's OUP book(s)

>>7953084
did you read Infinite Jest sequentially? my wife is doing that now, and she says the reading pace is akin to something pulpy and enjoyable, not very challenging. she's a thematic wizard, however.

the republic is one of my favorite books, and there is a great audiobook recording on youtube that's extremely comfy. i'd vaguely wager you are stable financially (whether independently or not), and you are slogging through tedium to reach your goals. you are, however, somewhat directionless

>>7953071
i'd skip inherent vice, as someone who likes GR. it might be nice to zone out at pieces of paper if you are working hard at research, but otherwise, meh.

are you comparative literature, philosophy, or biopsych?

>>7414141
yo, i have a firm understanding of both sentential and predicate logic, plus i know plato and most arguments for/against the philosophy of religion. do i need anything else before getting into Witty?

the only modern analytic philosophy i've read is plantinga and his ilk

>>7254830
thanks, it's for my 16mo daughter.

>>7254827
consider: my nails are short on my dominant hand, while my left-hand nails are long. what does this mean?
hint: i have an active sex life

>>7254838
i'm a young male, non-smoker, with a wife and child. i have zero musical knowledge and can't play the guitar. my daughter is happy and loves her parents very much. i am lonely, but i also have friends who live on the opposite coast of america, which is where i was born.

aside from those details, nice inferences.