/lit/ - Literature

To be very clear, you're not all "alone in the darkness" – a life weary melancholy in the learned has been a thing for quite some time; Ecclesiastes, Problems of Aristotle, Ficino's Three Books on Life, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy etc.

Schopenhauer gives this an excellent treatment in his Aphorisms for the Wisdom of Life, but he is hardly any less melancholic and gloom.

A good antidote, to balance all the existential dread and air headed theorems of the philosophers, is Max Stirner's Ego and It's Own.

Pic related.

Much of the philosophers wailing is, to be blunt, a childish cope for a failed Utopia of their idealistic fetishzation.

I like to remind myself occasionally of Chateaubriand's take on youthful melancholy;

>IfRenédid not exist, I would not write it again; if it were possible for me to destroy it, I would destroy it. It spawned a whole family of René poets and René prose-mongers; all we hear nowadays are pitiful and disjointed phrases; the only subject is gales and storms, and unknown ills moaned out to the clouds and to the night. There's not a fop who has just left college who hasn't dreamt he was the most unfortunate of men; there's not a milksop who hasn't exhausted all life has to offer by the age of sixteen; who hasn't believed himself tormented by his own genius; who, in the abyss of his thoughts, hasn't given himself over to the "wave of passions"; who hasn't struck his pale and dishevelled brow and astonished mankind with a sorrow whose name neither he, nor it, knows

Another final, but important point to make is Le Bon's distinction between theoretical and practical philosophy. I'll spam a quote in the next post and take a nap.