/lit/ - Literature

Reading the Tao Te Ching helps me see how life is cyclical

Not the greatest example but I'm reading The Sound and the Fury right now and it helps remind me that I'm not the only one in this world's history who experiences misery, anxiety and tough decisions.

>>11986031
The Savage Detectives. It really helped me to cope with a certain form of nomadism you necessarily have to face when going through hard times, be it psychological or physical. I had this feeling of being misplaced and of having being ripped apart by places and moments in times where I felt I belong. The Savage Detectives made me feel like there is no place where you "belong", really, that being nomadic and misplaced really is the natural state of human beings, and that one should really try to embrace it, rather than fight it. I started travelling a lot after reading that and I started reading more, which is the best thing you can do while travelling. Incidentally, I also wrote a lot and I was very much less "afraid" of life - of rejection, of violence, of brutality. I really care little about most things now. I don't buy stuff, I don't desire stuff. I go around, I read, I write, and if I have to work I know I don't belong to that work as much as I don't belong anywhere. I will be fine as long as I can befriend people, and move to a new place, and read, and have a knife in my pocket.

>>11986086
> and have a knife in my pocket
never change, /lit/, never change

>>11986031
Unironically Anti-Oedipus. Be deterritorialized and creative, take the BwO pill.

>>11986129
Can I get a quick rundown?

Will it cure my mental illness?

>>11986231
if by that you mean accelerate

>>11986086
Can you reccomend more books dealing with nomadism? I've never lived in a place for more than two years my whole life. The general feeling of isolation is starting to become a burden.

>>11986031
>>11986031
I got away from years of abuse by moving out to the southwest and doing logistical work for an expedition company, which meant that I spent massive periods of time driving 3 ton rigs full of supplies through the deepest deserts of the United States, delivering food, water, and equipment to teams across Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. I'd be out for days at at time alone and I loved it that way. That's where I read the Tao Te Ching.

In that of environment with that sort of literature my thoughts became largely concerned with the concepts of emptiness, and how wonderful it can be. I saw what the ancients meant when they said that nature does not rush, but that everything is always done on time, or that the natural world is perfect in its disorganization. I'd read an idiom written in the Tao about the nature of the world and then I'd look up at a field of stones and witness the concept before me. It was like a guidebook in a way. I began to understand the power of names and how they control our perceptions of ourselves and the world. I'd spend many nights just sitting out under the stars, meditating and listening to the perfect quiet stillness of the massive objects around me, recognizing that the unfractured block of the universe is real, and that everything really is just one undefinable object. There's freedom in that. Mesas, valleys, monolithic boulders, and the pattering feet of commuting stars, they're all the same and I am part of them.

The desert is a harsh place, but like a stone on the ground out there exposed to wind, water, and sand it smooths the traumatized edges of men. The nameless primordial thing "Laotzu" talks about is extraordinarily present out there, and it heals you like nothing else I've ever found. While the book did influence me, I think the land itself did more to shape my thoughts.

>>11986046
Interesting. That was one thing I identified and while it wasn't what I took away from it, I understand where you're coming from

>>11986031
Franny and Zooey. Actually I should read it again.

>>11986031
All Quiet on The Western Front.

The whole idea Remarque drives home at the end of the book how the reason young people are blown apart by war is because they don't have an established life and identity to cling to yet. All the older men and officers are okay because they already have families, histories, professions and things that make up who they are with witch to anchor their sanity in the face of the trences; but young people? All they have is their childhood, this small thing which is blown to smithereens by the war, and so they become the war. It's who they are.

It fucked me up, but in a way that I felt someone else finally understood who I was, that whole concept of being swallowed by your trauma, and feeling resonance about that with someone across time and space who took the time to write about it.

>>11986781
>I've never lived in a place for more than two years my whole life.
I've lived in the same area for 21 of my 22 years of life. Oh how I envy you.

>>11986936

Good post anon

>>11986031
I didn’t agree with his ‘solutions’ but just the knowledge that there was this whole literature of The dissatisfied and seeking was comforting and intriguing.
I also found the story of his writing of the book inspiring. (It’s not in the book but I knew his backstory. He was homeless in London while writing it. He would sleep in a sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath at night. During the day he would research and write in the British Museum library.)

>>11986781

There is a way in which I feel almost all of them are about nomadism or exile.. But I would say, a lot of Bolano. The Part of Archimboldi in 2666, for instance, but also The Woes of the True Policeman and Nazi Literature in America, and Putanas Asasinas (I don't know if it has been translated in English). But you can't go wrong with him, this was his theme. The Woe of the True Policeman is sort of incomplete but a lot of passages are worth your time, I would say.

Another author tackling similar themes is, in a sense, Nabokov, because of his own experience as a Russian emigre. There are several novels like Pnin, Pale Fire, the Gift and his "autobiography" Speak, Memory where the theme comes out more or less directly. I wouldn't say it is the main theme of the books, except maybe for Pnin, which isn't my favourite, but somehow most of these books resonated with me in that way.

Anothe one I have read recently, during a night spent in a bus station, is Joseph Roth's Flight Without End. It is the story of a soldier who gets detained in Russia and then has to travel home. It is not written in the best style possible, and it is somehow a very simple story, but I take it as a sort of archetipal tale of nomadic life. If you read it, come back here and make a thread about the "winds of Baku" and we'll talk about it.

As for the isolation, I hope it will get better.

>>11986936

Beautiful. I will definitely check the Tao Te Ching after this. Good luck with your life anon.

>>11987176
Thank you.

>>11987185
And you with yours.