On the benefits of reading:

I did not start reading seriously until I was 21, and admittedly I remain a very slow and ponderous reader.

Harold Bloom says that one should read to enrich ones inner life to paraphrase his much more eloquent explanation. To me the closest comparable phenomena is music, which at points seems to assemble in such a beautiful way that you feel the music has said something in the way the different combinations of notes create feelings, and you wonder at how a sound could reflect one's feelings, and how the different combinations create different feelings as though it were the code of the soul.

Perhaps books in a similar way places one in a position where the thoughts of another are reflected in one's mind, through the bone dead lines which mark the meaning of texts. I believe very strongly that books are helpful to those who are dispossessed of a feeling that the world around you is just boring and facile. It's easy to get sucked into such a cynicism and self confidence that you become like one who feels they have everything figured out. Assuredness of oneself is actually the mark of one who does not think deeply, I believe, because I find the more I read the more I feel my own limitations, and my own lack of knowledge comes to light relative to the broad concepts and thought patterns which books contain.

And that to me is the true reason to read. The feeling of the sublime which a book can show you; to put a crack in ones jaded disillusionment with feeling so self-assured. The illusion of self-assuredness which came from an illusion that one simply understands and knows, and the illusion that beyond oneself is just a sea of stupidity. I believe that to read well, and to read great literature which dispossesses one of the false belief of a sort of divine wisdom (known as the Dunning Kruger effect), is a feeling which can both dismount you and throw cracks between every bit of solid inference you've made, as well as ground you in newer, more unshakeable truths.

There are, of course, exceptions. Some books only seek to reinforce beliefs, instead of introducing new facts which humble you. And it is not inconceivable that any amount of reading can dislodge one from the idea that they know more than they do. I see it a lot, people who purportedly read a lot and still act like they know everything, when what they say is questionable. But I digress.

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This is without a doubt one of the things which reading has done for me, is help mold myself. Not as the clay of someone else, not as a reflection of who someone else wants me to be. But to truly and fully feel myself thinking, build grand architectural structures inside my mind, and watch all of them float around in confusion and discombobulation, out of which it wroughts my mind by consequence of reading the books.

Culture goes on, insipid; the people, vaguely speaking, muttering something and feeling themselves too tired and confused to engage in philosophical thought, most of the time. Not really their fault, considering gatherings of people aren't meant for thinking. But with literature you don't need to think about your very low bar superiority, your superiority which is not an achievement whatsoever; because you realize that there are serious thinkers who match and far surpass anything you have ever thought.

That is why I want to possess these thoughts, I simultaneously want to regain a confidence in my ability to think, and fight against the constantly disassembling illusion of certainty, and fight against the ultimate existential anxiety that everything is confoundingly contrived. The boredom. And find the beautiful and the sublime, which Shelley perhaps tragically noted, is all destined to be disillusioned over and over, and as Schopenhauer would say is always the beginning of new striving. Like a sailor I can only hope philosophy and literature can strengthen my weak and atrophied mental muscles, so I can powerfully grab the lines of the sails, and blaze a streaking wave on a reach towards the wind, and navigate the lost and endless cosmic emptiness, and return home to Ithaca, as Odysseus did.

>There are, of course, exceptions. Some books only seek to reinforce beliefs, instead of introducing new facts which humble you. And it is not inconceivable that any amount of reading can dislodge one from the idea that they know more than they do. I see it a lot, people who purportedly read a lot and still act like they know everything, when what they say is questionable. But I digress.

Fixing this paragraph

"There are, of course, exceptions. Some books only seek to reinforce beliefs, instead of introducing new facts which humble you. And it is not inconceivable that any amount of reading in some cases cannot dislodge one from the idea that they know more than they do. I see it a lot, people who purportedly read a lot and still act like they know everything, when what they say is questionable. But I digress."

Have sex.

I've had sex every week with my girlfriend.

>one's
Stop writing with your unwiped ass

Reading, to me, is an endless preparation: I know not for what, nor do I have any particular expectation to write a book worth reading, most books of course having been written solely for the sake of writing them (Of making many books there is no end) and not really carrying any actual value, but I feel that my only chance at aesthetic achievement is to steep myself in beauty all my life, decades before the eventual attempt, such that once I set my pen to paper I am literarily built through and through, a man of letters from skin to soul, loving letters so deeply that when life's deliriums visit me I hallucinate letters, loving reading so deeply that when I dream I dream of reading abstracted cobblings together of different works and authors (reading in a dream is more like encounting a Platonic Form than putting eyes to a page...), but then there is danger of loss also, that I will suddenly drop dead of aortic dissection or maybe even have a stroke or TBI descend upon me and wipe away my long labor, but so it goes, so it is, and in the end, if there is an end, it is all passtime.

Well put.

Thank you.

How do you dare to lie on an anonymous message board?