How can they write anything worth reading if they've always lived in sheltered from true suffering? What's there to be learned from writers like Mann, Goethe, Proust, Nabokov, Turgenev and many other overrated aristocrat hacks that never even learned what poverty was like? I'd much rather read Dostoyevsky who faced exhile and was almost executed, Tolstoy who abandoned his wealth to live in the fields, Victor Hugo who was exhiled from France and Grossman who participated in an actual war. Those are the men that know about life, not the sheltered academic writers that are only concerned about the form rather than the meaning.
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what suffering have you experienced?
I live in a third world country, you sheltered first worlder.
laughing stock
>Only suffering he knows is survival
>Probably even has a strong family bond because of this
Kek, sure pal this is true suffering. This writing will be a big hit for pretentious Western girls and dumb men.
which country, homosexual?
A country in South America, that's all I'll say.
My condolences.
I just want a book where the author tells the reader to kill himself, except in a very eloquent and varied prose, but the message remaining the same.
If I could write any good and wasn't disabled, I'd do that, people don't deserve anything good and most people who read are pseuds that really should off themselves.
Cioran and Ligotti
It's still pointless. I guess that really drives home the suffering experienced.
>”people don't deserve anything good and most people who read are pseuds that really should off themselves.”
But enough about you…
Sadly suffering doesn't make you a better person in any way.
I've heard people saying it gives you character.
Like a marble statue, perfect from creation, crashed into by a speeding car, personality. Really gets the noggin' going.
Yes it is. Read Taleb. Some stressors can make you stronger (example: lifting burbles, showering with cold water, breaking-up with someone who you thought was your true love, etc)...
Taleb is a real midwit. Stressors degenerate and desensitize you. They don't make you stronger, they make you dumber and more willing to accept everything.
I don't know about you, but the writers I love most seldom run away from their pains, and unlike most they actually can feel the festering wounds taking over them. It's why the aristocrats fallen from grace, carrying their noble sensibilities to an ugly and fricked up world, make for the best writers and poets. Unlike the poor that have suffered for a lifetime they feel their pain for them and weep.
>Taleb is a real midwit. Stressors degenerate and desensitize you.
Taleb is a serious thinker. He studied Epictetus, Seneca, Smith, Marx, and Hayek. Of course he has something valuable to offer: his intellectual capacity.
Stressors don't degenerate and desensitize me. They teach me what things I should avoid. After my painful break-up, I contemplated what went wrong and took my lessons and never dealt with the same mistakes again (dating dishonest egoistic prostitute with daddy issue and not being Orwellian bf enough).
Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Omar Khayyam experienced suffering and they produced enjoyable ouevre for all of us.
Yes, it does, it gets you closer to God.
How do you think someone could experience true suffering today?
Mann had to flee his country. Proust was a hypochondriac invalid
Suffering is fake
And gay
Suffering is only good if it fuels you with the spirit of working against it. Most people just tolerate it to the extent it is tolerable because they lack the energy to do anything about it. Of course anyone can fall in poverty for gorillion reasons the question is wether you have the will of getting out of it or not.
Everybody suffers. Suffering more than someone else doesn't make you better than them.
If you actually despise them, and not just the people who talk about them, then you should probably read to figure out why.
Chesterton refuted this absurd notion when he pointed out that Shakespeare lived a perfectly normal, uneventful life with very little suffering in it.
Perhaps that's why all his works are uneventful and devoided of meaning.
To just say "filtered" would not be enough
He's right though.
Compare him to Cervantes, who was a slave and a soldier and a prisoner at various times in his life, yet the tragic elements of his work rarely pertain to those circumstances.
Bach as well. Just an utterly conventional petit-bourgeois German
What books did Bach write?
Same number as Shakespeare
Nobody knows for certain who Shakespeare was, but OP is suggesting a general trend. In Western culture, we love to be spoken to about longing and tension and lifelong overcoming. We love it when the details of a person’s whole life, their entire biography, add up to one great theme or event or thing in general, and very often that thing is either redemption of suffering or suffering through tragedy. As a general rule, suffering is indeed a critical ingredient for greatness.
General rules are for LARPers. What are the great tragedies in Shakespeare's life? What about Goethe? What about Ariosto, who wrote his masterpiece before suffering any hardship?
We should just admit that this desire for the artist to be tormented is an extra-literary desire, something that in actualiyy does not really matter when it comes to the quality of their works. If we are too dumb to ascertain that quality we just fall back to biographical quirks. But this is just vanity.
Shakespeare’s son died
This. It affected him so much that he wrote Twelfth Night. Being a new father myself I can't imagine worse kind of suffering than the loss of child, especially when it's one of a set of twins. Whenever you look at the surviving twin you'll remember the one that died.
All of Goethe’s children died before him, 4 died as infants.
Everyone can go through suffer. People pretend aristocrats had everything served in their lives but until the 19th Century many of them were expected to serve the military for instance. Wars have more suffering than being some unpaid worker in the city. It's a bit like the women complaining.
Suffering is like depression
It seems to hit losers the hardest
Some people manage to 'suffer' despite living their entire lives in absolutely idyllic security and comfort. (Yes, Virginia, I'm looking at you.) Others take everything the world can throw at them and say "is that all you got?" So if we're measuring suffering it ought to be objective. Fighting through the First World War earns you some points. Being very sensitive doesn't.
It's hard to learn about the world without at least a little bit of suffering, but I don't think there's that much correlation.
GOOD WRITERS WHO SUFFERED VERY LITTLE
— EMILY DICKINSON
Not rich, but she lived more-or-less as she wished, insulated from external reality. Any unhappiness was self-generated.
— MARK TWAIN
He had to make his own way in the world, but nothing truly awful happened to him. And he was successful.
GOOD WRITERS WHO SUFFERED MODERATELY
— CHARLES DICKENS
Had to leave school at 12 and work in a factory because his father was imprisoned for debt. It didn't last that long but it left its mark on him.
— CORMAC MCCARTHY
He was pretty poor until he got the MacArthur grant.
GOOD WRITERS WHO SUFFERED A LOT
— DANTE
Sure, the Beatrice misery was largely self-inflicted, but there's also the whole exile thing. Plus he fought at the battle of Campaldino. He knew what life was about.
— CERVANTES
Fought at the battle of Lepanto and got his left hand cut off, didn't he? And he was impoverished when he wrote DQ.
GOOD WRITERS WHO SUFFERED MORE THAN WE CAN IMAGINE
— NIETZSCHE
He had migraines. Before they had painkillers.
— H. P. LOVECRAFT
No-one bought his stories so he was forced to live in a cheap district of Providence surrounded by Lascars and Italians. Hold me Black personman.
Good lists, post more.
You forgot Goethe. It seems like the most suffering he ever had was some unrequited love and not like his legal career, which he more less abandoned for better pay early on anyway.
Goethes suffering was moral. If you understand then you understand. Poverty isn’t the only condition that brings suffering in life.
stop gatekeeping based on a picture of a sword you saw in 6th grade
The more writers suffer from personal experience the more likely they are to be censored or deplatformed for wrong think.
being rich isn't being exempt from suffering
being poor isnt exclusively suffering
writing isn't just about putting down on paper what has happened to you and what you learned from it
if you want to exclusively read about a specific kind of suffering and you equate suffering to being given imagination and introspect, more to you.
Nabokov had his family home and all his wealth stolen by commies when he was an orphan teenager. He had to flee Russia or be killed. How is that not suffering?
Ah so you are a wheel of time fan then? Considering how he mowed down a bunch of viet cong?
Nabokov was living in Germany with his israeli wife during the 30s and might not have been able to escape. Im sure some of their friends were murdered by Hitler
True suffering has to do with the degree of consciousness of the sufferer and various organic factors. Comparing your suffering to geniuses like Goethe and Proust is like an animal comparing theirs to man’s.
>he thinks physical suffering is the greatest suffering
t. nigrolus epithumetikon
Literally everyone suffers in some way or at some time. It is an inherent human trait
First Love by Turgenev is one of the most fricked things I've ever read. Suffering isn't always some ASPCA commercial, sometimes it's the quiet desperation of a young heart.
>First Love by Turgenev is one of the most fricked things I've ever read.
How so? Seemed fairly "normal" to me.
Okay, Plato
What did Plato say about suffering?
In Apology, he says suffering is not real because the bad man can not do any harm to the good man's soul. I have no idea what that guy is referencing in his post though.
Did your mother not make your tendies for dinner?