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What Hacker News says
- > “There is a moment, just before creation begins, when the work exists in its most perfect form in your imagination.”
I think TS Eliot said this exact thing, but more poetically, in “The Hollow Men” (1925):
> “Between the conception and the creation, falls the Shadow”
Which remains one of my all time fave pieces of writing. So much said in so few words.
- Old prediction from 2013:
There will be no "collapse" the way some of these people think of it. It's not going to be like the movie "Dawn of the Dead" or whatever where one day suddenly shit hits the fan and prices skyrocket and everyone begins to riot and the SS comes marching down the street to kill everyone. There will be no "happening". It's far more insidious than that. Read the poem "The Hollow Men" by TS ELiot and you'll understand.
You'll just notice that every day simple things will become a little more expensive. Everyone's homes and apartments will start to get smaller. your work hours will get longer, but your pay will decrease. You'll see family and friends less, and find that in time you care less about them. Every day you'll find yourself lowering your standards for everything: work, food, relationships, etc. Job security will no longer exist as a concept. You'll notice houses and apartments shrinking. People will start hanging on clothing longer and longer. Less people will get married, even less will have children. People will engross themselves in technological distractions and fantasy while never truly experiencing the real world.
Whatever dream people used to have about what their lives were going to be will become for them a distant memory. The only thing left for them will be the reality of their debt and their poverty. And every minute of every day they will be told: "You are stupid, ugly and weak, but together we are free, prosperous and safe."
That is the collapse. The reduction of the American man into a feudal serf, incapable of feeling love or hate, incapable of seeing the pitiful nature of his situation for what it is or recognizing his own self worth.
- In a similar vein I think these lines from T.S.Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men" beautifully expresses one's struggles with the self:
Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the shadow Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the shadow Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow - What the hell. Here's my list of literature everyone should at least try (in no particular order):
Homer: both the Iliad and Odyssey
Sophocles: Oedipus the King (read it - far better than you might think)
Plato: The Apology of Socrates
Sappho's fragmentary poems (the translation by Anne Carson titled If not, winter is especially good)
Dante: Inferno
Shakespeare: at least one tragedy, one history, one comedy and one of the final "problem plays"
John Donne: a bunch but if none else Elegy XIX To His Mistress Going to Bed
Philip Larkin: he didn't write much; read the complete poems (if nothing else, look at "Born yesterday")
T.S. Eliot: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", "Return of the Magi", "Hollow men"
Ernest Hemmingway: A Clean Well-Lighted Place
Herman Melville: Bartleby, the Scrivener
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent
Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
George Orwell: Any and all of the essays, but especially "Shooting an elephant" and "A hanging"
Stendahl: Red and Black
James Joyce: A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man
Andre Dumas: The Three Musketeers
Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
I'll shut up, except to say that although I agree with some of the people on the thread that reading "great books" just because they're considered great is stupid, these books were all a joy. I remember them each pretty happily and return to a few of them now and again and just browse through for awhile. Some "great" books really are great, and if you're reading for yourself (not as a forced assignment), they're often well worth the effort (because, yes, none of them reads like a magazine article).
- Future leaders... Common, they are already grifters! It's a spectrum but the system selects for cheaters and psychopaths. Everything is highly superficial and empty.
Reality has become exactly like in T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men."
- The Hollow Men is from 1925. Try to read it like a beatnik poet, world-weary and confident, with finger snaps and bongo drums or a jazz orchestra in the background. Eliot was a fascinating fellow traveler person. My favorite site for his poems is here: https://mypoeticside.com/poets/t-s-eliot-poems
