/lit/ - Literature

>>21473726
Pleb. Here's a great one from the start of the book.
14
What Is Called Love

Avarice and love: how differently we feel towards each of these words! And yet it could be the same impulse twice named, in the first case, disparaged by the ‘haves’, in whom the impulse has settled down somewhat and who now fear losing what they have, and in the other, glorified as ‘good’ by the discontented and the thirsty. Love of our neighbour – is it not a hankering after new property? And similarly, our love of knowledge, of truth and even all eagerness for news? We gradually grow weary of the old, familiar things we securely hold, and again stretch forth our hands; even the most beautiful landscape lived in for three months is no longer assured of our love, and some more distant shore excites our avarice: what is had loses much in the having. Our pleasure in ourselves thus seeks to sustain itself by continually transforming something new into ourselves – that is just what possession means. To grow weary with a possession is to grow weary with ourselves. (One can also suffer from an excess of possessions – and then the desire to dispose of or distribute may assume the honorific ‘love’.) When we see a man suffer, we welcome the opportunity to take possession of him; for example, the charitable and compassionate do this, calling the desire for a new possession awakened in them ‘love’, and taking pleasure in it as in a new conquest beckoning to them. However, it is the love of the sexes that most clearly betrays possessiveness: the lover wants the unconditional and exclusive possession of the person he longs for, he wants unconditional power as much over her soul as over her body, he wants to be loved exclusively, and to live and reign in the other soul as what is highest and most desirable. When we consider that this means nothing less than to exclude the whole world from a precious commodity, and from the happiness and enjoyment it affords, that the lover contemplates the deprivation and ruin of all rivals, and would like to be the dragon of his golden hoard, the most inconsiderate and selfish of all ‘conquerors’ and exploiters, and finally that to the lover himself the rest of the world seems pale, indifferent and unprofitable, and that he is ready to make any sacrifice, disturb all existing arrangements, and put his own interests above all others – we are astonished that this ferocious avarice and injustice of sexual love has been glorified and deified to such an extent. Still more astonishing is the fact that the concept of love as the opposite of selfishness has always been modelled on it, when it is perhaps precisely the most candid expression of selfishness! Here apparently the ‘have nots’ and the covetous have determined usage – there were probably always too many of them.

>>19718070
1) East of Eden
2) The Count of Monte Cristo
3) The Bible

>reading? , no i just saw the school of life video on that topic

>ドストエフスキー

>>16069928
thanks for the bump and it takes me 5 seconds to change ip

>>16063775
>murciano, por supuesto

>>15773715
>access

>æ
>œ

>>15226026
>100,000 years
The universe hasn't existed for that long.

>why yes i think that writing is a product of decadent cultures and that all knowledge should be orally transmitted, how could you tell?

Basque, of course

>why yes, VALIS is my favourite book, how could you tell?

>>14534459
>metaphysics of horticulture

RAP? MORE LIKE CRAP

>Reject both

"Guenon and Coomaraswamy were right about everything"

>Non-fiction? Fiction? I don't read either; I'm too busy writing.

>Yes, I am an atheist. How could you tell?

Lol, fix your root chakra my dude.

>Read a book? Only if it has pictures.

Fuck off discordfag

>One copy of the Ars Goetia please

>dude, religion and all that shit is stupid. there is only science, and that stuff

I browse /cm/ in public