/lit/ - Literature

>would I were

>>19907711
The soundless roaring of the great solar furnace up there in the vast ether became, too, at that moment worse than merely indifferent to the motions of this infinitesimal creature advancing into the bracken-grown expanses of the historic Heath, like a black ant into a flowerpot.

Mary's thoughts were like a rain of bitterness and a dew of sweetness gathered in the hollows of a tree-root. A brimming over from them all would have escaped and vanished if she had tried to express them in any sort of speech.

The tolling of the bell in the flint tower fell upon them at that moment like a long, bony arm thrust out of a coffin.

...the multifarious influences that flit about in our life-stream, like shadowy tadpoles beneath thin ice...

Philip's thoughts were like far-flung hooks piercing the gills of some monstrous Fate-Leviathan that he had resolved to harness to his purpose.

This garment hung so loosely on her slender figure that, as she stretched herself upon his bed, Petrus of Picardy was compelled, for the third time in his whole life, to give himself up to such a wave of passionate adoration that he felt he could sacrifice even the pride of being Antichrist in his worship of those pearly contours of Lilith’s body, now resting there like a white shell half-revealed and half-concealed beneath a wavy tangle of foam as it lies on the sand.

Any aboriginal spirit at this juncture, whether that of a deity, or a tinker, or a witch, who possessed the power of reading the thoughts in alien brains, would have been fascinated, as it darted like a sand-martin from cavity to cavity in these unusual skulls...

[His face] was positively convulsed with the ultimate ecstasy of killing. His mouth was open and twisted awry; his eyes stared so intently that they seemed as if at any second they might flow or drip or sweat or soak into the alder-bush. His whole face was crumpled and wrung and knotted and sucked inwards. And then in a second it relaxed like the bursting of a boil, and became, as far as any human expression was concerned, blurred and blotted out.

Then he looked back again at her exquisite profile. How could he, he asked himself, describe to her the very curious elation which he had felt a second ago through all his senses, an elation that gave him now a delicious aftermath of satisfaction, like a wave drawing back over a bank of pebbles?

Last night I read the bit in Exodus with Moses and God on the mountain. MAJOR KINO. The rules after the Ten Commandments were very interesting. God is still very insistent on getting sacrifices, I guess this'll change at one point during the book, was Jesus the final sacrifice? ...I'm trying not to read the book from a Christian-backward-looking-perspective, in the sense of reading what comes later into everything. Anyway as for the rules it was mostly agreeable common sense,
Some thoughts:
>And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death
Doesn't this imply enslaving? Yet slavery itself is considered a simple fact of life.
>If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine
the unborn baby isn't yet a person otherwise it'd be murder and subject to "an eye for an eye"
>If a thief be found... and be smitten that he die, there shall no blood be shed for him. If the sun be risen upon him, there shall be blood shed for him
it's kinda libtarded that you're not allowed to kill burglars during day time
>Neither shalt thou countenance a poor man in his cause
the KJV here is a bit obscure. The Ancient Commentary series for this verse has the heading "No Partiality to a Poor Person", the Douay-Rheims has "Neither shalt thou favour a poor man in judgment"
if so Marxists BTFO, the ever-sensible Chrysostom writes
>Do not be overcome by pity or unduly influenced if the wrongdoer happens to be a poor man... And if we must not show favor to the poor man, much more must we not do so for the rich. Moreover, I address these words not only to judges but also to all men, so that justice may nowhere be corrupted but everywhere kept inviolate
Good stuff!

>Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions.
>Poetry represents forms chiefly as they suggest other forms; feelings, as they suggest forms or other feelings. Poetry puts a spirit of life and motion into the universe. It describes the flowing, not the fixed. It does not define the limits of sense, or analyze the distinctions of the understanding, but signifies the excess of the imagination beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or feeling. The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur ; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner...
>Poetry, according to Lord Bacon, for this reason,‘has something divine in it, because it raises the mind and hurries it into sublimity, by conforming the shows of things to the desires of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things, as reason and history do.’

Is it jih-naw-stick or guh-naw-stick?

I read Book 3 this morning. It continues to introduce the characters. I guess what interests me most is the relationships between the gods and the mortals. e.g. when Priam tells Helen:

No crime of thine our present sufferings draws,
Not thou, but Heaven’s disposing will, the cause
The gods these armies and this force employ,
The hostile gods conspire the fate of Troy.

Reminding me of Edmund's words in King Lear: "This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion..."

Everyone's always referred to as "the brother of...", "the son of...", here I was thinking that capitalists invented kinship to divide le workers. Helen is the most human character so far, the bit about her wishing to see her brothers on the battlefield and wondering why they're not present then Homer revealing the reason was very moving:

"The rest I know, and could in order name;
All valiant chiefs, and men of mighty fame.
Yet two are wanting of the numerous train,
Whom long my eyes have sought, but sought in vain:
Castor and Pollux, first in martial force,
One bold on foot, and one renown’d for horse.
My brothers these; the same our native shore,
One house contain'd us, as one mother bore.
Perhaps the chiefs, from warlike toils at ease,
For distant Troy refused to sail the seas;
Perhaps their swords some nobler quarrel draws,
Ashamed to combat in their sister's cause.”

So spoke the fair, nor knew her brothers' doom
Wrapt in the cold embraces of the tomb;
Adorn'd with honours in their native shore,
Silent they slept, and heard of wars no more.

Poor critters are playthings of men as men are to gods

With that the chief the tender victims slew,
And in the dust their bleeding bodies threw;
The vital spirit issued at the wound,
And left the members quivering on the ground

Helen is the only one to see thru an immortal's guise

Struck with her presence, straight the lively red
Forsook her cheek; and trembling, thus she said:
"Then is it still thy pleasure to deceive?
And woman's frailty always to believe!"

Anyway, although there's obvious differences between the gods in Iliad and the singular God of the OT, both are compelling because they possess human qualities: they're jealous, arbitrary, sometimes kind, sometimes cruel. Zeus being a God who goes to bed is way more interesting to me than the popular notion on here via Guenon and Atmanfags of the One, big undifferentiated, unconditioned oneness, how dull. Ee: translations, I'm glad there's a huge variety to read in English. I don't think the timeless appeal of the poem lies in its original meter or how it sounded, rather it lies in the narrative, its human characters and human gods.

>>19569092
>the letters of Ewest Hewwuawoy

>>19510047
feeel an antiet bug a boor?

To the reformers the situation appeared simple enough. The papal Catholic tradition had appropriated the true word to its own uses, had traduced the truth to its own ends. In a public garden at Geneva there may be seen stone statues of these dour religious radicals. There they stand inappropriately enough behind a pretty artificial pool with their grave grim faces : Luther, Calvin, Knox, Zwingli, Melanchthon, and the rest of them. I have seldom looked upon a more imposing group... what majestic moralists, what surly whoreson moralists, and yet it never struck their laborious, over-serious minds, no, not for a moment, that Christianity itself, in its primary origin might not accord with fact...

...Tenaciously, blindly, they held now to the Book. The writers of the Bible, John Calvin asserted, had been “sure and authentic amanuenses of the Holy Spirit.” To an outsider it seems extraordinary that the damaging reasoning faculties of these men went no further than they did. How is it that they saw so easily through the acclaimed miracles of their own day and yet never for a moment doubted the validity of such palpable fables as the story of the Virgin Birth and of the Ascension?

Except for "Candide" and a few excerpts from the "Philosophical Dictionary," I must confess I have no wish to turn over another page of Voltaire. It is simply incredible to me that human beings possessed of the same senses as ours could find satisfaction for their imagination in the sterile moralising, stilted sentiment, superficial wit, and tiresome persiflage of that queer generation. I suppose they didn't really. I suppose they used to go off on the sly, and read Rabelais and Villon. I suppose it was only the preposterous "social world" of those days who enjoyed nothing in literature except pseudo-classic attitudes and gestures; just as it is only the preposterous "social world" with us who enjoy nothing but Gaelic mythology and Oriental Mysticism.

when it comes to translation spirit > accuracy. the translation has to be a work of literature itself, as worthy as the original text. a translator should be a great writer not just a scholar.

That servile path thou nobly dost decline,
Of tracing word by word and line by line.
Those are the labour'd births of slavish brains,
Not the effect of poetry but pains;
Cheap vulgar arts, whose narrowness affords
No flight for thoughts, but poorly stick at words,
A new and nobler way thou dost pursue,
To make translations and translators too,
They but preserve the ashes; thou the flame,
True to his sense, but truer to his fame.

Brush not the bough for midnight scents
That come forth lingeringly,
And wake the same sweet sentiments
They breathed to you and me
When living seemed a laugh, and love
All it was said to be.

Within the common lamp-lit room
Prison my eyes and thought;
Let dingy details crudely loom,
Mechanic speech be wrought:
Too fragrant was Life's early bloom,
Too tart the fruit it brought!

i've no idea what you gents are saying but i read this in a fantasy novel last night and liked how it sounded
>the ideas we make up in our minds can be followed by our minds; the feelings we have in our hearts are put there by Nature and they begin and end in darkness and mystery

i learned today that 闖紅燈 "run a red light" is a euphemism for doing it on her period

History happens when The Masses do stuff, this is Science, we're all in agreement. But we also know the Masses can be bewitched by False Consciousness (wrong ideas, Prager U). They need to be programmed with the right ideas in order to be herded in the right direction and convinced that they're the ones willing what they've been told they want into existence. Doesn't this mean ideas drive the masses which drives history? Isn't the Great Man the one with the best ideas?

The absurd idea that one gets wise by reading books is probably at the bottom of the abominable pedantry that thrusts so many tiresome pieces of antiquity down the throats of youth. There is no talisman for getting wise—some of the wisest in the world never open a book, and yet their native wit, so heavenly-free from "culture," would serve to challenge Voltaire.

I've read Chapter One and a little bit of Two of Waldun's opus L'Academie, some thoughts:

In Waldun's world society is conformist and strictly regimented,
in the street, Eddington sees
>all walking in the same straight line, all wearing the same earpieces, the same blank expression
Eddington does the same
>he walked in a straight line
as opposed to walking in zig-zag fashion like a crazy beatnik. People walk in straight lines because they are conformist. They conform because they live in a surveillance state, at home they are watched by some kind of tv screen and outside:
>tall, militant figures in black suits lurked in the shadows, tall, militant figures in black suits lurked in the shadows
even in the middle of the night
>Black suits still stalked the streets
you wouldn't wanna cause trouble here because
>guards in masks carried machine guns

The rules are strict
>talking on The Box was prohibited
and strictly enforced, Eddington is told
>"No talking out loud in the streets."
a mysterious man in a long coat is also told
>"Sir, no speaking out on the streets.
the system's ideology is inescapable, even on "The Box"
>Black text against white backgrounds proclaimed the tenants (sic) of The Regime alongside transport route information

Nothing escapes the Prefects notice, when Eddington has a mild panic attack, immediately
>The Prefect walked toward Eddington. "Are you well?"

yet despite this we are informed on the very first page that there is
>trash cluttering the street
and
>pieces of rubbish whirled along the ground

Question: Who is doing all the littering? There seems to be a lot of it, yet people are afraid to even talk outside...

Thanks for Reading.

Via Google: Laurence Sterne in a sermon from the 18th century wrote that opportunity if "once lost, can never be regained". There's also a Christian book called Wisdom of Holy Scripture from the 19th century which says "innocence once lost, can never be regained" in reference to man's explusion from Paradise. The second half of the quote can only be found attached to the first, attributed to Milton and used in amateur novels.

Tradition is not solely, or even primarily, the maintenance of certain dogmatic beliefs; these beliefs have come to take their living form in the course of the formation of a tradition. What I mean by tradition involves all those habitual actions, habits and customs, from the most significant religious rite to our conventional way of greeting a stranger, which represent the blood kinship of 'the same people living in the same place'. ... We become conscious of these items, or conscious of their importance, usually only after they have begun to fall into desuetude, as we are aware of the leaves of a tree when the autumn wind begins to blow them off—when they have separately ceased to be vital. Energy may be wasted at that point in a frantic endeavour to collect the leaves as they fall and gum them onto the branches: but the sound tree will put forth new leaves, and the dry tree should be put to the axe.

Reading Henry James one feels like a wisp of straw floating down a wide smooth river

In Surah 2 it says:
2.6: As for the Disbelievers, Whether thou warn them or thou warn them not it is all one for them; they believe not.
2.7: Allah hath sealed their hearing and their hearts, and on their eyes there is a covering. Theirs will be an awful doom.
(Pickthall translation)

What's the connection between 6 and 7. Is it
>"they believe not" BECAUSE "Allah hath sealed their hearing and their hearts"
OR
>"they believe not" THEREFORE "Allah hath sealed their hearing and their hearts"

big difference between the two interpretions... which is it? are there other interpretations?

>An unschooled beggar woman in Tibet, strong in the faith of the Buddha, has a more enviable lot than many an eminent professor in other lands whose obsessive pursuit of purely samsaric investigations constitutes an obstacle a hundred times more insurmountable than mere illiteracy and some degree of petty superstition could ever be for that poor woman.... Her simple faith, however limited, must count as an elementary knowledge, whereas colossal erudition directed, not to the centre but to numberless peripheral phenomena, must count as a peculiarly pretentious form of ignorance

The clear, chaste, remote and distinguished wisdom of Emerson with its shrewd preacher's wit and country-bred humor, will always be of stirring and tonic value to certain kindred minds. Others will prove him of little worth; but it is to be noted that Nietzsche found him a sane and noble influence principally on the ground of his serene detachment from the phenomena of sin and disease and death. He will always remain suggestive and stimulating to those who demand a spiritual interpretation of the Universe but reluct at committing themselves to any particular creed.

It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual instinct that could give that stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race the name of the fair sex; for the entire beauty of the sex is based on this instinct. One would be more justified in calling them the unaesthetic sex than the beautiful. Neither for music, nor for poetry, nor for fine art have they any real or true sense and susceptibility, and it is mere mockery on their part, in their desire to please, if they affect any such thing.