/lit/ - Literature

>>1580
I have often had the very same fantasy or one might characterize it as a problem, a disease, an infirmity or a noxious devil squatting heavily upon my chest making my every waking moment a laborious struggle.
I want to be like the hero of old like Acheiles, Hector, Marcellius, Scipio, Scipio, decimus mous and so on. Yet i live in an age where it seems heroism is denied to me, Mishima, of course, is the apostle, the personification or one might more properly say avatar of this feeling. The revolt against the safety, harmony and gentility of modern life in favour of dark fantasies of blood, death, gore and ceaseless struggle against ones fellow man.
I cannot with truth say, in truth, that this feeling is constricted to modern times,FDR famously use to tell the story of the time a German uboat came with in sighting distance of a ship he sailed in, ever in his mind teddy's maxim that a man wasn't a man until he fought in a war, dicing with death. Do I even need to mention Byron? so why this feeling, why this ache?

I suspect two reasons firstly what Hobbes would call vainglory " Vain-glorious men, such as without being conscious to themselves of great sufficiency, delight in supposing themselves gallant men" & that these vain-glories Vain-glorious men, such as estimate their sufficiency by the flattery of other men, or the fortune of some precedent action, without assured ground of hope from the true knowledge of themselves, are enclined to rash engaging" & " thought them too mean for the good parts which they thought were in themselves and more there were, that had able bodies, but saw no means how honestly to get their bread. These longed for a war" that is we believe that we shall be, or do, better, have greater wealth, greater prestige, greater access to sex, in the brutish society of violence than in world of civil gentility as emphasised in the stories of Robert Howard.

Secondly it might be that this feeling is a natural humour which effects a significant portion of the male population regardless of the bloody brutality of the age or lack thereof. Take for example Caravaggio, a man of million times more talent and prestige than you or I could ever hope to achieve, a man who name was held in high regard before we both but twinkle in the milkman's eye and will be long after we have shook off the mortal coil and passed beyond the veil of tears. Caravaggio, the man who painted for Popes, Cardinals and Kings was a thug, a brute, a murder and a homosexual who delighted in violence and bloodshed, in hazarding his life against fellow Bravos( Italian ronin) all this inspire of his success, his fame, his wealth and riches. montaigne quotes from some former thinkers on the matter "to serve for a blood-letting to their Republic, and a little to evaporate the too vehement heat of their youth, to prune and clear the branches from the stock too luxuriant in wood; and to this end it was that they maintained so long a war with Carthage."