u/Rudddxdx

in moby dick the try-works, when the ship resembles hell, or else some manifestation of the evil demiurge, and of ahab's madness, when ishmael is turned away from the compass, and later, quotes ecclesiastes that all is vanity, is this in a way a dismissal of the compass, that all the world is evil and unknowable, and that to fly by a compass is as useless as to fly into the all-consuming darkness?

Ive just begun to grasp gnosticism, and I am trying to match passages with some of its theology. But other times im lost. For instance, in this chapter, there's also mention of geometry as ishmael scours the pots with soapstone, and I feel im missing this meaning.

Has there ever been criticism against descartes for the way he bridges the gap between the formal reality of a kind of substance and the objective reality in its idea? it seems arbitrary to say that the amount of reality in the cause of a thing which is also represented in thought, and is somehow an effect, which goes from jumping from tangible existence to something as amorphous as an idea - has this been called to account by later or contemporary thinkers?

"I can still perceive a horror and be social with it"... "I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote".... "...roused all my curiosity" Ishmael has always rang more absurd to me than Ahab, whose life he's willing to forfeit for the singular sociopathic ("monomaniacal") hope of killing the Leviathan. Camus always said it was ahab whose the absurd hero, but (methinks) its Ishmael.

He would rather sleep with a cannibal than a drunken Christian.

There's no purpose for him but to get out into the open sea and experience it. He boards the Pequod with an empty purse and a thin empty knapsack over his shoulder.

The "savage" redeems him. No "hypocrisy or bland deceits"

Christianity is rather a "hollow security". He wants to knock peoples' hats off.

What reverence for Christian hope? He prays to Queequeg's idols.

I don't know. Maybe Im wrong.

I graduated from Penn State University in 2006, and ever since, I told myself I would become something more than I have become, something great. My hopes destroyed by mitigating factors I would rather not divulge, the fact is I am 43 and I feel my life is over and nothing good has been accomplished.

Lately the following dream, in one guise or another, is recreated (I should rather label it "nightmare" or "pseudo-nightmare"):

In it I am grown old and grey (though I am yet still rsther youthful in appearance), though I am still attending college. My grades are terrible. Most semesters I can't muster a single passing grade.

Often I find myself wandering the halls when a group of youths (one vaguely appearing as a bully of mine from my own youth) will begin to torment me with foul and vile words, sometimes even physically attacking me.

At times I enter a class I had forgotten I was to be attending, and in a state of terrible anxiety, upon entering the teacher asks who I am and what I am doing in it. (This actually occurred in reality 22 years back. It may just be a stray memory).

Each semester, I take maybe 2 or 3 credits. I have been in college now 22 years. My parents are tired of my never making it to graduation. Sometimes I find my mother emaciated, covered in disgusting, horrifying sores, physically drained and near death.

I wonder if this dream, all its horror, and my failure to pass college despite my old age is twofold: wish-fulfillment that I still have post-college ahead of me, yet combatted by the repressed notions of failure, exemplified by my struggling on and on and unable to proceed or succeed.

Life is draining from me in reality as it is in the dream, snd in both cases I remain at a point of stasis.

Is this anywhere near the realm of a correct interpretation of what might be going on?

It's not a question, but this stupid Reddit demands a question mark. Whatever.

For 22 years, I've been struggling with insomnia. Sleep specialist after sleep specialist, psych after psych, non-narcotic-make-you-drowsy-yet-never-put-you-to-sleep-mightaswellbeNyquil medication after medication.

Twenty-two years.

Today, this being the 22nd day of insomnia (insomnia in this case, physically awake, every moment vouched for, now and again to doze off and hover suspended around the first half of the first level of sleep, though conscious of the physical embrace of pillow and handfuls of clot), anyway, this being 22 days, I resigned myself and went to see my doctor, to beg for that minor boon - a script of Ambien or Lunesta, finally, after ten years.

For ten years, my doctor has been throwing non-narcotic meds at me, the entire range, a slew of potent melatonin, respectively.

Twenty-two years of this

I explained, and all of this is true, that I had to temporarily quit my job, suspended bill payments, move in with a relative, and remain consigned to the reclined lumbar position day in and out. Ive quit exercising. Ive gained 26 pounds in three weeks. My body is entrenched in cortisol and it is useless to lift weights because the muscles don't heal.

Twenty-two years of seeing Sleep specialists.

Finally, at her wits' end, she gave in and prescribed me 5 mg of Ambien.

I'm 43 years old, now. But for some reason, if you ask a doctor for a narcotic BECAUSE IN 22 YEARS IT IS ALL THAT HAS EVER WORKED!, they assume you are still going to raves, dropping acid (not that I ever did either, but that's beside the point), getting inebriated, sniffing cocaine, and picking up hookers.

As the wheel revolves, that wheel of referrals (to, first, the Sleep specialist who will necessarily ignore my pleas for help, the evidence of what had helped me, and begin again prescribing me a slew of non-narc tranquilizers, until finally, I'm sent to a psychiatrist for the 45th time, and then sent back to my PCP, who then will reply:

"Okay. Well, there's another Sleep specialist. Try him.'

I have officially become transformed into Sisyphus.

Where or how can I find a doctor who will help me? What can I say to convince them that this two-decade-old problem is a serious problem requiring a known solution, And who yet does nor deny me this reasonable solution?

I had to get all that out. Please. I need advice here. I'm suffering beyond comprehension, I promise. I just need what I know works and a doctor who entertains some semblance of empathy/objectivity.

Everywhere I look I see vicious criticism, almost downright hatred, aimed at Strunk and White's 'Elements Of Style'.

My confusion is with the idea that it is all just "made up", opinion, and unhelpful for writers. But the point of the book seems to seek to help writers go all the way back, as if to wipe.the slate of bad acquired habits clean, or else, to help writers learn to follow basic rules from the very beginning, and from mastering the basics, go on to find their own style eventually.

It doesn't seem bad to look for help at getting started from professors who have been doing this forever instead of randos on Reddit and Youtube.

So why is it "harmful"?

Am I missing something here? There may be a writer out there, after all, who is never known the meaning of a split infinitive, to show and not tell, etc, the core of the core of all composition. Why is this book a subject of attack?

I tried the audiobook, but I got tired of rewinding every five seconds. Audiobooks on philosophy have never been my thing - i need the book.

The problem here is that Camus makes ten thousand references to other authors.

Ive read and re-read The Stranger, I understand everything about it, and I have read some of the existentialism like Sartre (Being And Nothingness almost killed me).

But im getting off the point. I bought the book, 'The Myth...', this time, and I will be reading it after I finish something else requiring a lot of devotion. But im still worried about the huge mass of other authors Camus references. I'm always wary of a thin little book which has had enormous impact. I have a feeling every passage is dense with meaning, and I'm kinda terrified.

Is there any way to get over this hurdle? Any PDFs I might read, first?

Ellie makes her way to Earth space. But either Isaac is obliterated, or else he and Carver have arrived and wrecked. The Blood Moons have reached earth

Which ending should the fourth follow if, in fact, there was to be a fourth?

How much of the narrative takes place in space, and how much on earth?

Would it be possible, with these as undeveloped starting premises, to create an epic/comic narrative put of the following narrative of Jonah, the whale, and Revelation?

(Please know I'm a novice at writing. I am here only because I don't even know what a workable idea looks like. This is just the skeleton. There's no character, no depth, no real.unity, nor character outlines. These are just a few basic premises.)

How do we get to failed Revelation from the birth of the kitchen?

1. Jonah, ensnared in Leviathan's belly and awaiting Fate, goes to work turning seaweed into sandpaper, rolling it in brine and salt. Belt-sander style, Jonah begins sanding down Leviathan's teeth (hoping to escape through the mouth without being ground to dust), while the incoming flux of loam is thickened into soap.

2. Jonah is saved. Leviathan, however, is in peril. His teeth are so white Mariners can spot him fifty miles away, so he is forced to change his attack style, shooting up from the sea floor like a torpedo (and we get 'Moby Dick' 1,800 years later.).

3. God is so impressed with Jonah's polishing, turning blood stained teeth into pure ivory, he (Jonah) is ordained "Heaven's House Cleaner". One day, Jonah decides to make God a gift for saving his life, so he takes to polishing the celestial sun sparkling white.

4. God, though impressed, is at first blinded by the glare, and for the first time in eternity, he averts his eyes, and looks away.

5. Awaiting this opportunity since Creation, ever-watchful Satan takes an axe to Heaven, cleaving away a wedge of eternity, which plummets smoking to the barren womb of Hell, and smashes into many minutes and seconds.

6. This single wedge of eternity now removed grows bigger, the cracks chase one another, forking in one direction, ever-diverging, running away with themselves faster than the pure and unworked hands of the Angels can keep up with.

7. As God and all of His Elect work to repair these ever-growing holes, the devil sends the fires of all of the sins of Hell through them. Time is rapidly effaced.

8. All the skies of the world are alight, blazing and hot as steaming bronze, smoking, raining embers and torrential hailstorms of coal descend upon all the earth.

9. Everything is on fire. Nobody saves anybody, only their possessions. The gap between Hell and Earth is bridged. A red and black molten rainbow ebbs across the horizon. Heaven is finished.

10. Jonah finds the key to the Celestial Locker, containing the Holy Extinguisher, but all that's left to extinguish is a wedge of ivory, a piece of the gilded Stove of Paradise. It burns up just before he can pull the key.

11. Satan is victorious. He sails all the oceans of the Earth, seven times around the world with all the Elect of Hell. Halfway around the earth on his eighth revolution, Leviathan springs up out of the waves and snaps the ship in half with his big, white, polished ivory jaws. The rigging is severed, the masts collapse, the leaden prow tips headlong into the deep, dark waves. The boat sinks. The fires go out.

Homer I have been reading for years. No problem there. I've read Livy's History of Rome (up until the reign of Numa), at least 20 essays on various topics, Ovid, books on the myths just to brush up, Stoic literature, etc.

What more can possibly be required? Again, this is only a first reading of the epic. I can't see what more is needed, here.

Should I find a Hesiod source, too? Or can I finally pry into my book? The Fitzgerald translation will be the translation I am reading.

Thank you for any help.

Can you point me to any sources that go into the hidden references to Stoicism in this poem? I'm not looking for anything discussing Stoicism generally, just specifically Aeneid subtext (for instance, "run with the wind" has some connection to Fate - these kinds of more shadowy references).

I'm about to read it for the first time and I'm putting in the work first to learn about Augustun Rome/myths/Republic vs Empire, etc. I'm a little intimidated, so I keep putting it off.

It's just exhausting, anymore. The level of womens' standards for men is so outrageous, and the fact that men have even to fear and scrupulously avoid glancing in a woman's direction or else risk public condemnation by being splashed all over social media and labeled "creep' and "stalker" drains women in general of all appeal, physical and emotional. At least, this is what I and thousands, if not millions of other men, think.

I'm just curious to read other opinions. And I am perfectly willing to disown this opinion if someone can convince me otherwise. But even womens' physical appeal is destroyed by their repugnant personalities. In fact, it's a pleasure to look away and an even greater pleasure to just stay in and live like Polyphemus in his cave forever.

To be sure, I wouldn't have posted this if the problem hadn't reached nuclear levels. I think that men in general have all but surrendered their desires and hopes and dreams for any kind of long-term, warm, and loving relationship. Certainly, they've given up on marriage.

I understand the function of both alone, and I'm also aware that one usually precedes or follows the other, but sometimes, for example, in Paradise Lost, I've seen Milton insert a spondee and then drop straight back into the iambic rhythm.

What I'm finding, though, is that they both have to be used one after another.

I was just wondering if anyone can expand with a little bit of a fuller explanation of this function.

When necessary, which is always, I crush up Ambien and snort piles of it, 3-3.5 MG at a time, mixed with some Xanax and Klonopin, Seroquel and another med whose name I forget.

None of it works except the Ambien, which mostly makes me wallow in a light, feverish, sweat-soaked psychedelic Pandemonium and nightmarish terror which rarely reaches deeper than level 2 or 3 REM.

These meds are all procured illegally, since my doctor won't prescribe me anything narcotic (not because she knows Im an addict, but because the AMA would rather dole out uber-Nyquil like Trazodone and a bunch of other useless bullshit.

So now Im at an impasse. I dont know why I can't sleep, and my drug cocktail grows heavier and heavier.

I'll make this snappy. You can interpret it how you like. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe.

I was lying in bed in my darkened (darkening-curtained) abyss when my phone, as is its wont since stupid Gemina came out, restarted of itself.

It shut down, lit up with a pink flare as the T-Mobile window appeared, and then went dark again, or so it seemed. The room, or, better yet, the abyss of hell in which I sleep seemed somewhat restless to one side by the glare against my closed lids.

I opened my eyes, this after about 2 minutes. I assumed the phone was still starting up.

But it wasn't.

The home screen was - had been, up. I turned on my side to look.

Gemini was up.

Lingering like a curse was the word, "hey"

The fact that it had maintained itself for so long (2 minutes is a marathon for Gemini) is not anything I can account for. All the time, I was silent. It was 3 or 4 am.

Perhaps the kicking on of the air current influenced it, but it comes on in a whisper too tenuous to be picked up, not enunciated into a coherent word.

I've always thought that my apartment had some shady, understated spiritual essence unlike anywhere i had ever lived before.

Footsteps in an unoccupied room. Photos knocked over. Towels on the ground where they'd been hung the night before, then this

There is no dramatic ending. This is it.

Say I am confronted with a situation that comes about twice:

A girlfriend is expecting me at a certain time. Separating me from the house is a narrow but dense strip of woods. If I fight my way through a patch of thornbushes, I will arrive on time but will be covered in a bunch of prickly thorns. If I go around the wood and wind up being late, she exhausts her anger against me with a slap to the face.

No matter which route I choose, the collective pain of the twenty little thorns is identical to the temporarily throbbing smart by the slap. Either way, I will feel the pain and just as quickly will the pain go away.

Before this occasion, I have long known the nature and extent of the pain of the several thorns and, months or weeks or days previous, the pain of the slap. Yet each time I made a different choice.

Assume, for arguments sake, there is no residual pain, discomfort, or guilt between myself and the girl. The consequences of my choices, whether the battle with thornbushes or the annoyance of the girl is identical, and, going in, I know this.

Each choice was more or less mindless.

How was my will determined in each case?

I can't express what I need to in these stupid titles.

In 2022, I posted a short horror story to a Reddit space and was subsequently annihilated by everyone.

I decided then that I needed to get away from fiction writing, destroy all my personal relationships, sever all ties with all friends, and spend my time reading and studying.

For four years now, I have spent 4 hours a night reading great works of literature. For 3 years, I have been training myself on deductive/formal logic as well. I was informed that I could not begin writing horror stories again until I had "paid my dues" to the immortal philosophies and thinkers.

I've just finished a college course on predicate logic. I've read all ton of books I can barely comprehend.

Jesus, I've even read hundreds of playwrights, poets, novelists, historians, psychologists, etc etc etc etc....

At what point will my studies be over and when can I write?

People have made it clear that then and only then, after having mastered all of this, and rhetoric, and geometry, then and only then may I begin.

So, how do I know if I am able to begin? I have almost no interest in most of what I have just mentioned, but to grit and bear it and "earn what I have paid out."

I hate that I have revealed this. It makes me sound like such an amateur, a phony, a "dilletante," as the more eloquent say.

For all these years I have been brimming with ideas, but apropos of my own un-intellectualism, I understand that my werewolf stories can't yet be written. But I have so many ideas, and all is want to do is write and engage people emotionally.

Where does math fit into this scheme? Did Bram Stoker spend his life doing syllogisms in order to write Dracula?

This all seems ridiculous. Any opinions?

What was Billy friedkin's reason for portraying the demon as omnipresent, disembodied from regan, as in the scene in the kitchen, or from kinderman's view, floating past the curtains? It seems there was some desire on the director's part to portray it not just as a single contained entity but as also a kind of environmental pathogen, oppressing as well as possessing.

Can anyone elaborate here?

Otherwise called "telling the truth", which I take Hubert Selby Jr to have meant when he said "destroy the ego, get out of the way, and tell the truth", and, "I don't write these stories. I'm only a vessel through which the story is told. I dont know what will happen to (my characters).

Some say quiet, others meditation, and still others through some sort of divine transubstantiation, so to speak (of metaphysically-speaking).

But I comprehend the notion. Get out of my way. Yet my writing is so affected and self-conscious, so stilted and fake.

Can you recommend a way to "Tell the truth", so to speak? Is there a method by which you achieve this truth telling? Or just practice?

Is there a way to really separate oneself from the writing, in order to make a story believable, and render the storyteller trustworthy in the readers' eyes?