/lit/ - Literature

>>19572609
Nietzsche is anti-urban? Wasn’t his ideal the city state of antiquity or the Renaissance?

>>19572624
"If there are no firm, quiet lines on the horizon of his life, a species of mountain and forest line, man’s inmost will itself becomes restless, inattentive, and covetous, as is the nature of a dweller in towns; he has no happiness and confers no happiness."

very anti-urban there.

Durkheim somewhat

Because the City is the end result of humans developing their surroundings, so pastoral LARP at the expense of slave niggers or serfs and the like is the exotic, aristocratic ideal.
Anprims are continuing this larp but instead of using colonial-era social institutions to prop up their LARP they're expounding communism or monarchism as the answer.
Living in prettily manicured nature through the leveraging of systems created in and maintained by the City.

>>19572981
A very confused mind wrote this post.

>>19572609
suburban hands typed this post

>>19573060
my village has less than 1k people, cope

>>19573109
oh so you're a petty burgher instead. even worse

>>19572609
>>19572981
Premodern cities were death traps that smelled of sewage and horse waste. Modern cities are death traps that sometimes smell of sewage and human waste.
So improvements were made, but nobody's writing romantic poetry about it.

>>19573130
not an argument numale

>>19572609
Idk about "pro-city" but I can think of a writers that are cosmopolitan--Borges and Conrad to name a couple.

>>19573245
>people die in cities
Fucking and? People have died ignominiously in the fields in scores; that nobody was around to record their deaths is certainly not a point for the pastoralists. Survivorship bias on full display.

>>19573443
And anyway, this is all false equivalence. People want to compare the nadir of urban life to the zenith of country living, because only at the absolute peak of leverage for the pastoralist is the comparison even remotely favorable.

Always hilarious to see experts turn into complete morons when they try to comment on anything outside their fields.
Those chuds should have stuck to philosophy instead of spewing their hot tales.

>>19573443
>>19573459
Perhaps I should've said fertility trap so you'd understand the complete horror.

But go ahead and list these wonders of the city that can't be gained from driving in from the country and renting a hotel to see a show or whatever. Is it the constant grating noise? Do you just need to be near the "action"?

What is the action anyway? Drinking? Gambling? Whoring? I'm not a degenerate so I'm not sure what I'm missing out on.

>>19573612
It is unfortunately taking part in the cultural center part of it being a cultural center. Not really a big deal if you aren't a writer, artist, musician or worse. An actor.

>>19573459
>People want to compare the nadir of urban life to the zenith of country living, because only at the absolute peak of leverage for the pastoralist is the comparison even remotely favorable.
a wordy, noun-heavy, pretentious sentence that communicates nothing besides your vanity and midwittery. see me after class

>>19573612
more commodities, better jobs, freedom from social stagnation that's heavy in the countryside, more people to meet naturally, stuff like that

>>19573841
>freedom from social stagnation that's heavy in the countryside

>>19573683
Oh not just "a city". Like I wouldn't be better off if I moved to Guangzhou or San Francisco. I have to live in "the city". That's quite a requirement to get this benefit that almost all are denied. Still I wonder why these cultural participants never praise it?

>>19572609

Of course independent thinkers would be against cities
The vision of the archetypal wise sage is one who is born of the city yet renounces it
Cities are for people who want to be controlled and sacrifice their freedom for convenience and all of the negative attributes of urban life stem from this fact

>>19572609
I read "the young hitler I knew" by hitler's childhood friend August Kubizek. When they were looking for a room to rent in Vienna, their account shed light on the problems with cities back then. Families lived in window-less, roach/lice infested, overpopulated, cramped, manuer infested apartments. For a while the mortality rate were very high, and increased because people kept migrating to them. but yeah, that might be why people hated cities (and still do).

Isn't the majority of humanity living in cities relatively a recent phenomenon? Like maybe post WWI for developed countries.

Well Hugo was mainly "for" cities because of the whores. There's a story that when he died all the whores of Paris wore black veils over their vaginas.

>>19573932
Hugo liked cities because he thought it bred a kind of admirable, working class young man with the internal flame to affect change in the world. He goes into this in Les Mis.

>>19572609

IN PRAISE OF CITIES

I.
Indifferent to the indifference that conceived her,
Grown buxom in disorder now, she accepts
– Like dirt, strangers, or moss upon her churches –
Your tribute to the wharf of circumstance,
Rejected sidestreet, formal monument...
And, irresistible, the thoroughfare.

II.
You welcome in her what remains of you;
And what is strange and what is incomplete
Compels a passion without understanding,
For all you cannot be.

III.
Only at dawn
You might escape, she sleeps then for an hour:
Watch where she hardly breathes, spread out and cool,
Her pavements desolate in the dim dry air.

IV.
You stay. Yet she is occupied, apart.
Out of a mist the river turns to see
Whether you follow still. You stay. At evening
Your blood gains pace even as her blood does.

V.
Casual yet urgent in her love making,
She constantly asserts her independence:
Suddenly turning moist pale walls upon you
– Your own designs, peeling and unachieved –
Or her whole darkness hunching in an alley.
And all at once you enter the embrace
Withheld by day while you solicited.
She wanders lewdly, whispering her given name,
Charing Cross Road, or Forty Second Street:
The longest streets, desire that never ends,
Familiar and inexplicable, wearing
Cosmetic light a fool could penetrate.
She presses you with her hard ornaments,
Arcades, late movie shows, the piled lit windows
Of surplus stores. Here she is loveliest;
Extreme, material, the work of man.

— Thom Gunn

>>19574624
nice, thanks for posting

>>19572609

THE CAPITAL

Quarter of pleasures where the rich are always waiting,
Waiting expensively for miracles to happen,
O little restaurant where the lovers eat each other,
Cafe where exiles have established a malicious village;

You with your charm and your apparatus have abolished
The strictness of winter and spring's compulsion;
Far from your lights the outraged punitive father,
The dullness of mere obedience here is apparent.

Yet with orchestras and glances, O, you betray us
To belief in our infinite powers; and the innocent
Unobservant offender falls in a moment
Victim to his heart's invisible furies.

In unlighted streets you hide away the appalling;
Factories where lives are made for a temporary use
Like collars or chairs, rooms where the lonely are battered
Slowly like pebbles into fortuitous shapes.

But the sky you illumine, your glow is visible far
Into the dark countryside, the enormous, the frozen,
Where, hinting at the forbidden like a wicked uncle,
Night after night to the farmer's children you beckon.

— W.H.Auden

>>19573468
KYS chapo trash.

>>19572609

Poets have tried to describe Ankh-Morpork. They have failed. Perhaps it's the sheer zestful vitality of the place, or maybe it's just that a city with a million inhabitants and no sewers is rather robust for poets, who prefer daffodils and no wonder. So let's just say that Ankh-Morpork is as full of life as an old cheese on a hot day, as loud as a curse in a cathedral, as bright as an oil slick, as colourful as a bruise and as full of activity, industry, bustle and sheer exuberant busyness as a dead dog on a termite mound.”

— Terry Pratchett, 'Mort'

>>19573459
The real point to remember is that no one ever chooses urban life. No one ever willingly gave up subsistence farming or even hunting and gathering. Either they were forced into it through genocide and war, or they were coerced into it by creature comforts at the expense of personal freedom. People want to return to the place that was taken from them by invaders or their own treacherous fathers, so it can't even really be talked about as a choice.
>>19573841
>social stagnation
For you maybe. It follows that a namefag would be especially insufferable in RL

>>19574727
>The real point to remember is that no one ever chooses urban life. No one ever willingly gave up subsistence farming or even hunting and gathering
Why do the white, privileged socialists living a luxurious life in the 'burbs make it so easy to point them out?

>>19572609
Baudelaire and every other decadent.

Here's the reality: the country is not nature. Agriculture is not nature. Ditches and hedges and fences are not nature. What it is is the food-producing district of the city. If you like having fewer people around, it's not because you're overflowing with love for humanity. It has nothing to do with being more free, because nowhere are the unwritten rules of society more strictly enforced than in a small town.

It's basically the preserve of one type of man and one type only: a married father who has plenty of money and likes to rule like a king over his household. You can say "based", but remember that you will never own a house, you won't meet any attractive women in the country, and Uncle Bob is that local nabob, not you.

>>19574805
...I would also say that it requires an extreme lack of imagination to be content with that local hotshot lifestyle. The way that British aristocrats used to "live in the country" was to spend half the time in London hanging out in their clubs, leaving their wives at home where they couldn't get into any mischief.

>>19574762
The whole function of communism is to destroy ones roots, and they're roots lead back to a people subjugated. They're just happy slaves in gilded cages.
Urban society is the culmination of one hunter gatherer group solidifying their rule over the course of a thousand years. Really, the ones at the top never give up those roots, doing as they please to the populace beneath them.

>>19573612
>But go ahead and list these wonders of the city that can't be gained from driving in from the country and renting a hotel to see a show or whatever.
Even in his argumentation the pastoralist presupposes enormous wealth, or the suffering of debt, as though either lends credit to his lifestyle.

>>19573796
Nobody asked, nigger.
>>19574727
>No one ever willingly gave up subsistence farming or even hunting and gathering.
This is just self-evidently untrue and reeks of ideology. Not even an attempt at a genuine argument. The birthplace of all great society has been the city.
At least the anon above who would be a slave driver or LARPing industrialist is arguing from a position of aesthetics that can't be so abruptly falsified.

You want to read Joyce’s Ulysses. There’s a reason why this book is celebrated as the masterpiece of modern liters by every urban, cosmopolitan institution.

honestly had no idea there were so many effete urban dandies on this board. I suppose I just assumed we were all shitposting from our cozy yurts

Ayn Rand loved cities, especially highly vertical cities like New York, as phallic monuments to Man's power to conquer nature.

>>19575397
Sorry poorfag. That was already my conception of poverty. I have no idea what greater destitution than that would be like. Like seriously, how do you even have internet? Do African tribals get it on their cellphones now?

Also you never did say what was great about cities. It's it pic related?

>>19574624
>>19574639
>>19574646
Literally whomst?

>>19574805
>It has nothing to do with being more free, because nowhere are the unwritten rules of society more strictly enforced than in a small town.
Ah yes, "free"
You misuse the term.
"For indeed none can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." Milton
What are good men? Those who willingly agree to abide by the unwritten rules tradition has handed down to them, to accept limits to life, man's role as merely part of nature.
>You can say "based", but remember that you will never own a house, you won't meet any attractive women in the country, and Uncle Bob is that local nabob, not you.
Argument by cliche, how boring. Here's a more thoughtful take on it:
"Those readers who have not seen our country life can hardly realize the charm of these provincial girls. Breathing pure air under the shadow of their apple trees, their only knowledge of the world is drawn from books. In solitude and unrestrained, their feelings and their passions develop early to a degree unknown to the busier beauties of our towns. For them the tinkling of a bell is an event, a drive into the nearest town an epoch, and a chance visit a long, sometimes an everlasting remembrance. At their oddities he may laugh who will, but superficial sneers cannot impair their real merits—their individuality, which, so says Jean Paul, is a necessary element of greatness. The women in large towns may be better educated, but the levelling influence of the world soon makes all women as much alike as their own head-dresses.”
Pushkin
>>19575397
>Nobody asked, nigger.
No one agrees with your sloppy hot take.
>>19575859
>every urban, cosmopolitan institution.
Not anymore, he's a dead white male. Also modern lit is shit.

>>19576067
China may not be the best example for a standard, they have surveillance everywhere, not only in cities

>>19576274
> Not anymore, he's a dead white male.
He’s the one they let sit at the table with James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.

>>19576274
>not anymore, he's a dead white male
visit any english department and you will find classes on ulysses

>>19576288
>>19576288
Nice pic. But I hope the AI overlords aren't idiots.

>>19572609
what a wonderful painting. does anyone know its name?

>>19576781
Sunday in Bas-Meudon by Marie-Francois Firmin-Girard

>>19572981
um ok

>>19573876
>Cities are for people who want to be controlled and sacrifice their freedom for convenience and all of the negative attributes of urban life stem from this fact
t. never lived in an urban area

>>19576274
>literally who
kind of offended, honestly

>>19572609
>anti-urban and pro-rural
>pro city and pro cosmopolitanism?

How do you define it like that?
Let's say Cicero has places where he writes how he wants to go to his villas and engage in rural labor: to watch his slaves work. At the same time, I remember he wrote when he was forced into exile, how he missed the Eternal City, the Forum and the Roman political games, and how he wants to return. He was just a rhetorician and would describe with passion whatever he did.
Pushkin has poems where he confesses his love for St. Petersburg:
I love you, Peter’s great creation, / I love your view of stern and grace, / The Neva wave’s regal procession, / The grayish granite - her bank’s dress,.
That does not negate the fact that he lived with pleasure in his estate, among the forests and fields.

No, well, about Tolstoy, we can definitely say that by old age he was an opponent of the urban way of life. On the other hand, he was in some way a cosmopolitan, because he did not see value in the place of birth, origin, nationality and the like.

Come to think of it, Machiavelli was a city dweller and missed Florence deeply when he was banished to his country estate. Although his description of life in exile is quite iddilic.

>>19576949
Cicero quotes:
>He has always lived in the country and spent his time cultivating his land, a mode of life which is utterly removed from covetousness, and inseparably allied to virtue.
>I have myself known many men (and so, unless I am deceived, has everyone of you) who are inflamed of their own accord with a fondness for what relates to the cultivation of land and who think this rural life the most honorable and the most delightful.
>In a city luxury is engendered, avarice is inevitably produced by luxury; audacity must spring from avarice, and out of audacity arises every wickedness and every crime. But a country life is the teacher of economy and industry and of justice.

>>19576949
To your other points, a Pushkin quote has already been posted in this thread indicating his cognizance of the generic culture of cities.

About Tolstoy, it's absurd to say he was cosmopolitan - all those beliefs, which you overstate (he didn't see value in origin?) come direct from his deep Christianity and not from any material considerations which are where cosmopolitan sentiments derive.

>>19576067
>Using china as an argument
>"People want to compare the nadir of urban life to the zenith of country living, because only at the absolute peak of leverage for the pastoralist is the comparison even remotely favorable."
Thank you for proving my point

>>19576916
I was born in a big city and I've realized the people who romanticize cities almost never grew up there. They come from the middle of nowhere and want nothing more than to be caught in the tide and washed away by the cultural zeitgeist but that's not the type of person who survives in the city.
In the city somebody always owns you unless of course you're a CEO or something but guess what they all have private mansions in secluded areas because even the richest people in the world with no barriers know it's better to live that way most of the time. You know when Mark Zuckerberg buys a house he buys out the entire block just to have his privacy.
As for artists they go to cities because it's literally the only way they can make a living that's all there is to it really.

>>19577064
>so pleased with his wordy sentence, bereft of argument, he recycles it for a 2nd post
why is lit pseud central?

>>19577090
>Is so afraid of stumbling into predicted fallacious arguments again that he reverts to ad hominem
I accept your concession

this is a misunderstanding. praising cities vs decrying them has nothing to do with considering whether urban environments, and their cultural vitality, provoke good art, which is a better question.

like, Gogol and Dostoevsky clearly disliked urbanity, but their cities in their time deeply influenced the narratives and questions of their work. Gogol is a great person to mine for this, because he has his Ukraine tales as well as his Petersburg ones.

so, disagree with this dichotomy of rural v urban.

>>19577105
it's a pretty brainlet take, what else is there to say? "your argument is wrong because it relies on the use of bad examples" dressed up with pretentious words. no one ITT made this argument, and the examples have been good quotes from wise authors.

make an intelligent argument like this guy >>19577141 before relapsing to your passive state of smugness

The problem with rural areas is they are culturally barren; the problem with the cities is they have too many midwits with undue smugness. I think a small community of intelligent and virtuous people living in the countryside together would be best.

>>19577064
Yeah, like London doesn't have a similar system. Eventually are you going to actually list the nice things about cities?

>>19577252
"barren of culture" is a non-starter, there exists culture in the countryside, the lower middle class, "petit bourgeois" culture of the farmer, tradesman, artisan or minor proprietor. read Christopher Lasch's "True and Only Heaven" for a discussion of this culture strand, particularly in American history.

I think what you want to say here, but failed to say, was that in rural areas there is no deep appreciation for art and "high culture" as we see in cities. but do we see it in cities? aside from museums, which as Mumford points out are already a problem (a divorce between art and life) what culture is there? Opera houses? Broadway? Art galleries? What kind of art is actually shown there, except abstract, conceptual, all fake forms of art? What fashion is there but fast fashion?

>I think a small community of intelligent and virtuous people living in the countryside together would be best.
You're describing a commune. A lot of people tried it. Where have you been the past 130 years?

>>19577298
Yeah, by "barren of culture" I meant it lacks high culture. As I said, the cities are awful as they have too many uninspiring people, but if you're lucky you might find one or two worthwhile people
>Where have you been the past 130 years?
I guess I've been sleeping in a cave. Did any of them work?

>>19577342
>Yeah, by "barren of culture" I meant it lacks high culture.
As someone who has read a lot of freshman papers, the best advice I can give is to be clear and plain with your meaning the first time round.

>>19577298
>>19577342
Even those galleries, theaters, etc are there for economic reasons not because it improves the art.

And yes some of those communes are doing just fine. Religious ones though, the hippies failed pretty quick.

>>19577365
I am not writing my thesis on here anon. At any rate culture is synonymous with high culture where I come from

>>19577003
If you look in his letters, he will complain there that he already wants to return to Rome. I won't look for a quote for you.
>>19577021
>About Tolstoy, it's absurd to say he was cosmopolitan - all those beliefs, which you overstate (he didn't see value in origin?) come direct from his deep Christianity and not from any material considerations which are where cosmopolitan sentiments derive.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Patriotism_and_Christianity/Patriotism,_or_Peace%3F
He has such a peculiar Christianity, I would say in the direction of Taoism, but it doesn't matter. His thought moved in the direction from individualism and egoism to universal brotherhood, in general, the unity of mankind and nature. In such a spiritual sense, I would call him a cosmopolitan, my home is everywhere under Heaven. And not in terms of what I have breakfast in Paris and dinner in New York.
---------
With a great writer it is possible to find a quote for any occasion and equally convincingly prove the opposite things. It's like the Bible.

>>19577415
>If you look in his letters, he will complain there that he already wants to return to Rome. I won't look for a quote for you.
Kind of sad you think this somehow refutes the quotes I posted. If he wanted to return to Rome, it was to go on with his gloryhounding. It's like you don't know Cicero or history.

>His thought moved in the direction from individualism and egoism to universal brotherhood, in general, the unity of mankind and nature. In such a spiritual sense, I would call him a cosmopolitan, my home is everywhere under Heaven.
Okay, but this definition of cosmopolitanism is almost medieval. The modern definitions are material, "citizen of the world" and derive from the French revolution.

"Those pretended cosmopolites, who in justifying their love for the human race, boast of loving all the world in order to enjoy the privilege of loving no one." Rousseau referring to the leaders of the revolution.

>>19577454
I tried to get an explanation from the OP why he considers someone an urbanite or a ruralite. A great writer produces a lot of text, so different quotes can be found. It is necessary to look at it comprehensively, in aggregate, and what when he wrote and how he lived. In the case of Cicero, he led the usual way of life for his time and social state, when periods of political and business pursuits in the City were replaced by periods of life in country villas with rest and literary pursuits.

>The modern definitions are material, "citizen of the world" and derive from the French revolution.
I don't really know who Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote about there.
In our country, the phrase "rootless cosmopolitan" became a euphemism for "Jew" when Stalin, after the War, picked up anti-Semitism and was deceived about Israel. They began to say that there are people to whom the USSR is not Motherland, but who even were born here, but they and Paris and New York feel at home and they are just waiting for when it will be possible to betray their Motherland and leave where it is warmer, that is, to Israel.Since then, we have had this word a little dirty.
In a modern context, I understand a cosmopolitan as such a "urban nomad" who can constantly move between metropolises and feel at home in London and Shanghai and Sydney. And a trip somewhere out of town, an all-country area, for him is already getting into an alien environment.
In general, the word seems to have originated in Greece, when there appeared wandering philosophers who did not have their own polis. That for the free Greeks who valued their belonging to the citizenship of their polis and family ties with the phratry, it was very difficult.

Gee, I wonder why no one would want to live in a city before plumbing, municipal trash collection, or zoning.
Real fucking tough question.

>not a single author I've come across extols the virtue of cities besides Hugo w/ Paris

Four Two word phrases:
Indoor plumbing.
Central Air.
Running Water.
Sewage system.

Before the invention of these things, cities sucked.
Why would you expect any author before the 1920s to extol city life?

>>19572609
>Looking at the city today, with its crime, racial ghettos, the crassest consumerism, dandies, foppishness, luxury without limit, it's easy to see why the balance of wisdom seems to side against cosmopolitanism.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

>>19578170
>I don't really know who Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote about there.
I told you who he wrote about. The intellectual elite of the National Assembly.
>>19578199
>>19578207
So philosophers and writers didn't feel like writing positively about cities because they were yucky? Sounds like cope.
>>19578211
Nice argument, now back to pol.

>>19578259
I mean yes? If something is bad, really bad in multiple and significant ways, maybe it will be hard to find people who praise it?

>>19577224
shhhhh, I've already filed your concession away. You don't need to drive at me so to have it officiated.

the city is not conducive to literature. the pace is too fast, the environs too visual
"cosmpolitanism" manifests itself in film, television, theatre, and music

that said, the distinction OP talks about has been around as long as civilizations. the Romans invented the "pastoral" genre as a form of provincialist escapism

>>19579938
>the Romans invented the "pastoral" genre as a form of provincialist escapism
then why does Arcadia come centuries prior from greece?
>escapism
tacitly admitting cities are hell

>>19572609
>>Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Pushkin, Dante, Rousseau, Cicero, Burke all anti-urban and pro-rural
But the narrative of their works mostly takes place in cities.

Big think.

>>19577089
>I was born in a big city and I've realized the people who romanticize cities almost never grew up there.
And I was born in country. And I've realized he people who romanticize deep country LITERALLY never grew up there.

It's almost like there's something to be said about idealizing things different from what you know, and that there's a trend in one direction because most people (and effectively ALL the educated people) live in cities, and therefore idealize country.

mishima writes about the horror of the city in life for sale, something about how we are all stuck together yet ultimately isolated and alone; very 21-st if i do say so myself