He's over 25 and hasn't read the western canon

i would actually be very impressed if anyone did this. probably aroused too

Think about it. Somewhere in the world, there's someone who spent their entire teens reading and analyzing the western canon. And read most, if not all of it, in the original language.

interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtbloom.html

If OP is mentioning that list, he is just stupid.

And reading reactionaries like Bloom only will make you, ironically, a resentful old person unable to understand contemporary world. But, eh! I'm not a fascist, you are free to live and interpret as you want.

>he buys into the idea of a canon
Wew i guess

There is? The fuck are you smoking?

reporting in /senpai

well not the "whole" thing but more of it than anyone i've met/seen on Veeky Forums, by quite some margin

i didnt get out much as a kid

you could knock the canon out in like 5 years

Ive met the type, they are insufferable bores

>Think about it. Somewhere in the world, there's someone who spent their entire teens reading and analyzing the western canon. And read most, if not all of it, in the original language.
Claims to have spent*

im very interesting tyvm

they all are to themselves

i have good evidence that other people share the opinion. even if i'm not interesting to everyone at least im not insufferable as a bare minimum. i try to be quiet and out of the way most of the time.

I just remembered something.
>meet this qt 9/10
>her parents are masons
>she is part of a discussion group for laicist youth
>she is barely 20
>we were discussing Camus once
>I told her that I read the myth of sysyphus and find it fascinating
>she heard me taliing about Camus and when I finished she remained for a little time quiet
>after the silence she said shyly "yeah, I read Camus complete works in french like two years. I dont remember everything though, but its fascinating"
She's patrician as fuck. Damn masons, they know how to rise their children well.

>>her parents are masons
Gay or do they let women be masons now?

you need a light source to look into the barrel but you gotta be careful or else you'll set it off! this is why people typically recommend a torch over a candle, it's been a big reason why people today have read the cannon more than people in the past, because all they had was a light source made from fire which caused their death. many people didn't think it was worth to risk back then, which again is why people were more stupid back then.

This post taken from a short collection titled "things nobody would ever say"

Teenagers are incapable of analyzing anything except their own navels.

Camus is shallow, though.
20-year-old detected.

And? That used to be even more common before the TV area and everything

I'm 26 and intimately familiar with the banality of teenage "analyses" due to my job.

Sorry but no. In the brief era before television but after the concept of a "childhood" was constructed the youth spent much of their time messing around with their friends. And if you go back to before the idea of "childhood" existed children were just smaller, less efficient workers.

No no, some of you don't seem to understand. I mean someone who read the ENTIRE list bloom proposed and thoroughly analyzed it mostly in its original languages. So you'd have to have someone with insane parents obsessed with language learning and literature. There must be at least one person who's like that in the world. There's fucking 7 billion of us walking around.

The Western Canon is the entirety of Western lit from Homer to Boethius. That's what the Canon is. Dickens, Joyce, Faulkner, Swift, Bacon, whatever, all great authors, none of them are properly Canonical.

You can't call something a Canon if it changes every decade or two.

Bloom is a speed-reading plebeian.

>being THIS much of a pseud

Sure you are, thumbs up.
A Canonical writer is one that changes the direction of literature after them. They are simply defining points in the history of Western Literature.

The majority of them certainly did, but then again most people don't really invest themselves in literature. Is it really news to you that some people spend most of their time on their hobby or whatever it is they're passionate about?

this. when teenagers read classic literature they don't have the mental or emotional faculty to fully appreciate what the author is expressing or empathize with emotional complexities because teens are overly self-indulgent. That's why teenage literature panders to the only literary factor that young adults appreciate, which is themselves. Teens like characters they can identify with. The Stranger, No Longer Human, The Bell Jar, Murakami shit, Bukowski. Because the main character is "sooo mee!".
You think you understand themes like loss or solitude or sacrifice or religion, but at some point in your mid 20's your emotions congeal into something tangible and it's like learning these things all over again on a deeper dimension.

If you really have read most of the western canon before 25, do it again.
If you're stressing over the fact that you're barely getting into literature in your early 20's and you feel like you're behind, don't fret about it. The timing is ideal.

You don't even know what a canon is. A canon is a static rule or set of principles. Think of the Biblical canon. Are they adding new books to the Bible every couple of years? Of course not, if they did it wouldn't be a canon. When was the last time the Pali canon changed? Thousands of years ago, the Buddhists know what a canon is. Despite what your wikipedia articles say, the Western Canon is, has been, and always will be the works of Greco-Roman antiquity.

What languages do you need? English, French, Spanish, German, Danish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian? I have a Danish friend who could read all but the Russian. But I doubt I could convince him to read all that, he prefers getting high.

>reading Freud.

That drawing of D&G is so kawaii.

Both genders are allowed to get their degree in masonry at technical colleges.

>this is what plebs who didn't start reading the canon since childhood tell themelves to sleep at night

top kek. accept youll always be subhuman because you missed out on a patrician upbringing

>says the Wikipedia-scrawler

Such bullshit
You might as well say that you shouldn't read Joyce if you're not Irish or read the Bible if you're not religious etc. etc.

I read exclusively non-fiction and natural science books until 4th grade, a grade I was offered to skip because I was so far ahead of all subjects due to my reading. I didn't even know what fiction was until after we read Where the Red Fern Grows and I demanded that we read more about the lives of the characters and the dogs and my teacher had to spoonfeed me the idea of made-up stories. Literary patriciandom is something I can do without.

you're looking at it wrong. Being Irish and being relious don't demand a certain level of understanding from you.
Reading Joyce and reading the Bible does demand a certain level of understanding from you.

How did you make it to 4th grade without knowing what fiction was?

I don't know about everybody else but I laughed out loud.

When I was 16 it was like this
I had read the greeks and romans but I was nowhere near getting to the actual philosophical explosion that would come after the Renascence.
BUT
I browsed a shitton of forums and got a basic idea of pretty much any philosophical or political standpoint.
With this basic Idea I could pretend to know everything as I gradually read through it.
Now that ive gotten it all I dont appear differently and people dont treat me differently in conversation.

>tldr;
Fake it till you make it senpai

Just realistic fiction.
I came from a religious background and read science books obsessively. Animal field guides(reptiles, mammals, birds, insects, etc.) dinosaurs, physical science and mechanics, space, etc. So when I read the Hardy Boys or Judy Bloom or whatever I thought it was real.i thought everything written down that wasn't about monsters or robots was real, my idea of fiction was only crazy fantasy shit. So when my teacher told me there was no sequal because it was all fake I didn't understand why someone would write something from their imagination but not write something imaginative. Realism was a weird concept for me at the time.

>Reading Joyce and reading the Bible does demand a certain level of understanding from you.
Yeah, and some of it involves being Irish or religious.
Same goes for most books out there, because you can't fully relate to someone who lives in a different country and a different period than you. It's just like maturity.
You also can't truly understand what the character is going through without having gone through it yourself, so you should just abstain from reading anything because it's all pointless?

>Renascence

Pretty sure I did this.
I was home schooled tho so what else was I gonna do.