tired of being poisoned by irony, books to help me become sincere
Tired of being poisoned by irony, books to help me become sincere
Joseph Rodriguez
Other urls found in this thread:
David Nelson
Evan Cook
>BK by D
>MD by M
>LM by H
>GotS by H
Elijah Russell
Caleb Lee
lolita
Justin Reyes
Isaiah Peterson
henry thoreau
Christopher Walker
During this century of the final clearing of America there were certain individuals and even a few groups who regarded the spectacle with sadness and even disgust. Were it not for these solitary lights it would be more difficult for us to comprehend what had been done and why, for in that gap between what they stood for and what the majority was practicing, the issues and motives stand out in relief. I think here of Ralph Waldo Emerson, of John Wesley Powell, and of John Muir who quite literally jerked himself out of the stale bed of his father's Presbyterianism to become a kind of mystic and an effective voice of conservation. I think mostly of Thoreau whose steps always tended westward and who took Emerson to heart, even took him further afield and deeper into nature than the master himself had ever wished to go.
It is probably significant that Emerson gained his audience in 1837, the year of the Panic. For several years he had been asking irritating questions about the nature of Christian conduct and ritual and about Americans' existence in their lands. To him his contemporaries seemed peculiarly incurious about these lands, dead to the natural life they still harbored. Their condition of alienation jarred with the current cockcrowing nationalism. When he asked why Americans should not seek an "original" relationship with the universe, the query had a more troublesome depth to it than most (perhaps Emerson included) could have acknowledged. This was because from his Concord study, musing on the news of the day, the din of limitless growth and exploitation, Emerson sensed that the story of the New World was going to be the story of the Old World again; that there would be no fresh beginning here but only a brutal monument to meretriciousness and emptiness of spirit.
It was the younger man, Thoreau, who best intuited the depth and urgency of Emerson's question. It eventually sent him to Walden Pond and to meditating there on the savage life: whether the departed aborigines whose scattered relics were all around him in the woods might not have once enjoyed that original relationship of which Emerson had spoken and which now seemed so unavailable to nineteenth-century whites. In his hut on the edge of the jewel-like pond, surrounded by the gentle wooded bowl of its hills, he thought about the meanings of savagery, even of spending a day as the animals might. And throughout the book of his experiences there one finds evidence of his intuitive drive to dig, to burrow, to go earthward toward that original relationship. He tells us of digging his cellar where a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through the roots of sumach and blackberry "and the lowest stain of vegetation. . . ."
Adam Ortiz
In his bean field he writes that in his hoeing he "disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens," bringing to the light of his scrutiny their implements of war and hunting and husbandry. In winter we find him cutting a hole in the pond ice and gazing through it into the silent, secret world beneath where magical pickerel held themselves still as shadows. And in a more didactic passage, he urges us to settle ourselves, not like the restless settlers of his day, but as a people who would grow roots in the earth, wedging our feet downward through the slush of opinion and appearance "till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality. . . ."
For Thoreau, such a reality seemed more and more to be somehow connected to the Indian, though in his Walden days he only ruminates at the edges of the connection, remarking here and there that mythology might be the record of a primitive, original relationship with nature. In his journal he writes, "I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that nature with which I am acquainted. Mythology comes nearest to it of any." But perhaps myth could only arise from contact with the unfathomed, unfathomable wilderness, and with his fellow countrymen all about him laying feverish waste to the wilderness, where might such a profound confrontation take place? We need the tonic of the wilderness, he writes, we need to witness "our own limits transgressed and some life pasturing freely where we never wander." Well to the west of where Thoreau sat, Americans were determining that there should be no limits, no wilderness left unfathomed.
Seeking the ground of such a confrontation, Thoreau left Concord, tame enough territory after all, and journeyed up into Maine in 1846, again in 1853, and for the last time in 1857. During this period the purity and profundity of his quest was revealed, as Philip Gura has pointed out, for in Maine Thoreau found that the speculators, the fur traders, and timber miners had long preceded him and that any confrontation with the old New World was difficult to come by. In The Maine Woods he records his dismay at the messy, chewed-up landscape he encountered, and his even greater dismay at the degraded aboriginals he observed living a fringe existence in their cheerless slum dwellings. On his second trip he went deeper in with a Penobscot guide who whistled a marching song of the frontier instead of chanting the images of mythology. But he went back yet again, convinced his quest could be realized somewhere in the Maine interior, if only he could penetrate it far enough. By now he was sure that his earlier intimations had been leading in the right direction, that what he had been seeking was an aboriginal relationship to the universe.
Oliver Allen
This time his guide was the remarkable Penobscot Joe Polls. Thoreau heard him talk to muskrats, saw the strange phosphorescence of moosewood in a campfire, and finally achieved his meeting with utter wildness atop Mountain Ktaadn. Here at last was that reality he had heroically sought, that confrontation with the Other that had always been the great, unsuspected treasure of the New World. Here was Nature, savage, awful, and beautiful too:
"I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhanselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever. . ."
He felt its terrific presence then, as the old and vanished inhabitants had felt it everywhere, the presence of
"a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites,-to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we."
He felt possessed and unafraid of that possession:
"What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!-Think of our life in nature,-daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?"
As Thoreau well knew, these are the questions answered by all mythologies, and in this moment at least they were answered for him. Nature in such an untouched state, he reflected, must have made a thousand kindred revelations to the Indians that it had never made to the conquering white man. I think the key word here is "revelations"-to feel as the aborigines had that messages can come at any moment from divinity, that divinity has not been sealed off by canon and dogma and empty ritual, that miracles can happen for us. Thoreau sickened and died before he could go deeper in his quest, his last words revealing the profundity of his commitment to it: "Moose . . . Indian. . . ." But he left us enough evidence to suggest that he might have gone on to learn to write some words in that divine picture language that is myth, so to supersede Emerson who had said, "We too must write bibles." We too are writing them, Thoreau might have said: "I have had intelligence with the earth."
Aiden Brooks
Dostoevsky
Gabriel Baker
basically anyone who lived in the 19th century. dumb hipsters didnt exist back then
John Evans
>there was no irony in the 1800s
Samuel Foster
irony was one thing among others, ones it all there is, ones there is nothing outside it it becomes nothing
Nicholas Allen
Pic related is sincerely depressing
Easton Cox
>Tired of being sincere
what can I read?
Oliver Anderson
bruh
David Hill
The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts
Manalive by G.K. Chesterton
Caleb Williams
Acedia and it’s Discontents
Julian Murphy
E Unibus Pluram
Dylan Martin
Chesterton is a good choice. He shows that sincerity is fun.
Jaxson Taylor
Swift wrote in the 18th century, dullard.