/lit/ - Literature

>>18540994
Kneel, Eurofag

Reminder:
>Eusebius claims that, as a young man, following a literal misreading of Matthew 19:12, in which Jesus is presented as saying "there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of heaven", Origen went to a physician and paid him to surgically remove his genitals in order to ensure his reputation as a respectable tutor to young men and women
>He has been described as "the greatest genius the early church ever produced"

>>16160579
Film was never art.

Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally making use of them for other and more private ends than they were legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain, which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested; through those forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship.

For be a man's intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever keeps God's true princes of the Empire from the world's hustings; and leaves the highest honors that this air can give, to those men who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass.

Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency. But when as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization. Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest sweep and direst swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in his art, as the one now alluded to.

But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!

Give me one (1) reason why Moby Dick isn't the greatest literary work of all time.

>>15719525
>1.Moby Dick
Holy based, I’m glad /lit/ recognises the truth in this way even if a lot of the rest of the list is a mess. It’s a decent top 100 and the number 1 pick is great but much of the other ranking demonstrates the immature tastes of many of this board’s users:
>blood meridian, the stranger, & stoner that high
>American Psycho, BOTNS and Tolkien on the list at all
Underage is apparent but I guess this is better than what most other groups would come up with online

>>15503021
>whitest book ever
>not the book that contains the best chapter of prose in the English language that is all about whiteness

>>15391523
>he works with a charity called “Feed”
>“a world without whales, it’s too terrible to imagine“

>>15353875
>up next is Stubb’s supper
>I remember how funny it is from the last time I read it
What do people think of Dreyfus’s interpretation of the book (particularly his focus on the limits of perfection and the multiplicity of reality)? I know his lectures have been posted here before