/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12155759]

Are kindness and love at bottom an innate good?

Discuss, /lit/

[Anonymous No.12155776]

This is the literature board. Try the histories and humanities board.

[Anonymous No.12155786]

>>12155759
i don't give a shit about kindness, but not so for love. Love unironically is love; it cannot be considered anything else. Love is pleasant, but also violent and incites terrible agony (an example being the short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, wherein a character threatens to kill his beloved, and beats her, because of love). The Absolute Negativity, the Otherness, that love requires, threatens to obliterate the self, and anything else for that matter.

[Anonymous No.12155897]

>>12155786
But isn’t that the point of the story, that the thing we talk about when we’re talking about love isn’t actually love but the petty jealousies and personal baggage the accompanies our relationships?

I always thought that’s what Carver was trying to say with that one, some kind of general semantics angle that when we say the word live we’re actually talking about something else.

Good story though, they get drunk (like every Carver story)

[Anonymous No.12156426]

>>12155759
I hope love is the light of a higher reality, LSD seems to reveal that it is

[Anonymous No.12156760]

>>12156426
You are a massive plebe and a degenerate huxster of truth buying snake oil peddled by those who believe private prophesy can be obtained from a material substance manufactured in a secret lab for the purpose of making money.

To call your pleasure questing and vision questing a "revelation" of "love" is an obscene inversion. Love is not the euphoric sensation induced by taking drugs. And revelations of higher realities do not come by the ingestion of mere material. Love is a terrible, horrible suffering, a giving of oneself to another. It is the placing of a hand upon a bloodied festering wound, a willingness to sit beside those dying and gasping for air, a setting aside of days not for pleasure and recreation but the planting of grain and the burying of the dead. It is labor and pain, and there is no end to its work, no end to the onslaught of human need that cries out from a world awash in malladies of the body, the mind, the heart, beckoning ourselves away from ourselves until our whole life is all we have to give.

[Anonymous No.12157141]

>>12156760
Two possibles:
-That's pasta
-You're a huge faggot

[Anonymous No.12157196]

>>12156760
Based
>>12157141
Cringe

[Anonymous No.12157754]

>>12156760
Breh the light speaks for itself

[Anonymous No.12157774]

>>12156760
I admire your passion anon

But are you sure it's true

[Anonymous No.12157813]

>>12157774
>>12157754

Its based somewhat off of Dosto's "Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams" which Dorothy Day was fond of quoting.

Its truth is recognizable to anyone who has felt love call. Part of us wishes the person was just not suffering at all so we could go on about our day.

The ability of humans to overcome that selfish, animal impulse, and reach out to the another only because his soul/conscience demands it, is all the hope there is in the world. And one feels that hope in acting on love. One feels redeemed and washed, full of joy and sorrow all at once. Thats the essence of humanity, it is the purpose of life itself.

[Anonymous No.12157832]

>>12156760
>huxter
lol
you're completely right otherwise though

[Anonymous No.12157867]

>>12157813
"Thats the essence of humanity, it is the purpose of life itself."

Could you plz elaborate on this

[Anonymous No.12157881]

>>12157813
Just saying, LSD can reveal intensities of feeling that are just not at all available to ordinary consciousness

[Anonymous No.12157978]

>>12157813
Does love not evolve? I can imagine "love" a million years ago
>grug kill brug with bare hands
>grug take brug's mate
>kill and eat all brug's kids
>except the girl
>coz love

Why see it as a static thing? Why not as a direction to evolve, a direction that leads away from suffering?

[Anonymous No.12158047]

>>12157867
We are meant to seek God through the suffering of ourselves and others, and to find Him in the act of loving.

>>12157978
Probably love did not exist until 200 to 40 thousand years ago, when man ceased being an animal and was cast out of Eden (oneness with nature) forever, the lights of language and reason blinking on in the gradual refinement of eons of death by natural selection. Or something like that. Not as important as people make it out to be.

>>12157881
Because all those experiences are the result of a conscious decision to ingest material, lsd, like marijuana or mdma, is inherently limited in its ability to reveal. Everything which it might show you is bounded by the knowledge that it is materially induced, that all the experiences are the result of a material configuration of your actual physiological brain. This ends up reinforcing the modern delusion that consciousness is a metaphenomenon of material. That idea is our prison, and lsd is a strengthening of its bars, not a key out of it. All lsd really shows anyone, at the end of the day, is the disturbing fact that our experience can be dramatically altered by material, reinforcing the idea that love, sorrow, joy, pleasure etc. are meaningless byproducts of neurological structures and chemical behavior. This is exactly the paradigm your soul longs to escape.

[Anonymous No.12158062]

>>12156760
You’re too sentimental, dramatic, and petty towards those who aren’t as sentimental and dramatic as you are. That’s not real love, that’s narcissistic fantasies of heroism.

[Anonymous No.12158120]

>>12158047
It speaks for itself :-) Couldn't it? Emerson said "the definition of spiritual should be. that which is its own evidence."

I guess I'm asking, how did you come to these ways of seeing?

[Anonymous No.12158130]

Well they're not bad. Try to name a situation in which responding with kindness in love ends badly. Compared to the rates of responding with anger and hatred.

The only situation I can think of is perhaps in romantic engagements in which a lover puts trust in an abuser or is otherwise taken advantage of. Or if you love your totalitarian dictator and he conscripts you and walks your life off a cliff.

[Anonymous No.12158146]

>>12158120

I am not entirely sure. I know how the intellectual developement took place, but I also know thats not the whole story.

The following books (in order I read them) were enormous influences:

Seven Story Mountain, Thomas Merton
The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day
Hannah's Child, Stanley Hauerwas

Before that I studied (pretty intensely)7 or 8 religion courses at school and was briefly consumed with lefty politics (because I thought they could save humanity from its poverty and its wars).

[Anonymous No.12158169]

>>12158146

I just mean, what do we really know?

And also that psychedelics experience can be self-evidently profound

Would you ever try a large dose of LSD or mushrooms? It is something :-)

[Anonymous No.12158207]

>>12158169
I did all the drugs my dude. Had a good 30 trips, dmt, shrooms, acid, salvia, 2ci, all of that shit. Its dangerous and distracting.

For some the trips eventually point the way out of tripping. To quote OPs pic related, "when you get the message hang up the phone." But Id add that the message is a robo marketing call and youre better off not hearing it. Some kids get awfully lost in that shit. For several years I couldn't go on a hike without thinking "man this would be so much cooler on shrooms" which is pretty sad.

[Anonymous No.12158227]

>>12158207

Yeah, is not at all easy to reconcile with ordinary life, and I get the feeling one is meant to listen, and then act, that it starts to get dark if one hasn't listened, right?

[Anonymous No.12158229]

>>12157196
>responding to an injured and soulful assault on a false image of divinity with some brainless dualistic retort you got from millions of other unremarkable empty people and thinking you’re some sovereign because of postironic weight this carries in whatever social media hovel you affirm yourself within
debased

[Anonymous No.12158237]

>>12158229
Innocence