Has anything you've learned from literature helped you in any way? Are you able to apply these lessons to everyday life...

Has anything you've learned from literature helped you in any way? Are you able to apply these lessons to everyday life, or does it all end up in some cosmic pocket in your brain, separate from the real world?

1. Literature helps me to detach myself from my worries.
2. Literature helps me to appreciate the little things. Reading two pages on how beautiful the sky can be inspires me to actually notice the sky sometimes during the day, for example.

I don't know about 'learned,' per se, but certainly familiarized myself with some events, emotions, people, etc. Don Quixote's fantasies, Iago's revenge, Hamlet's ambition, The Garden of Eden, Humbert Humbert's obsession over the ever-fleeting Other, Stephen's spiritual journey, and so on. It's wisdom.

That's why Joyce called it the 'most spiritual of all the arts." But even if there wasn't wisdom, beauty is still a supreme Good in the world. What has anyone learned from Bach?

If we want to include non-fiction too, then philosophy has changed my life, yeah.

literature has got me laid more than a few times

also access to the sublime, functional ethical training, enjoyment/amusement

Plato helps me every day

Honestly, not a day goes by that I don't reflect on the wisdom of Socrates

Helps me meme

Do you think literature could be an effective way of teaching ethics to a wide array of people? For example some kids in the US were made to read books after putting racist graffiti on a historic building. Could 'punishments' like this be a good deterrent?

>What has anyone learned from Bach?

It's true that you might not learn as much from music as you would literature, but if beauty is a supreme good, and it helps people to detach from worry, and appreciate the little things, just as said about literature, then couldn't music could be equally important?

I think getting kids to read books is certainly better than throwing them in prison

They might even learn something

When I do something that causes anxiety like buying alcohol or ordering a book at the bookstore, I imagine being Meursault, who has a brutal honesty and doesn't care about societal norms.
Really helps.

Dostoyevsky has undoubtedly gotten me through some tough times.

of course you fucking learn from books

I learned how to kill people and get away with it.

literally no. its all been a giant waste of time

>What has anyone learned from Bach?
Supreme beauty
Maybe you just aren't autistic enough to get THAT moved by such an abstract medium, I'm my opinion thats a good thing, I think it is better to spend time reading instead listening to music. I listen to music all the time and it keeps me away from reading all the time.

except for meditations by marcus aurelius. the only book i bother reading anymore

I always try to remember to tell myself "what would Rimbaud do right now"

Not really. I don't enjoy reading literature, I only do it for the social capital and appearance of being cultured.

The question is have you applied anything you've learned.

As said, it get me laid a few times. Perhaps, it's all for my personal enlightment. I feel better, I can get away with myself and keep on living. I also agree with the enjoyment part by the way. It's not just that, but you could see litterature like a tool that allows you to enjoy more games, more things. And I travel through life with some help due to litterature. Thinking, pointing some things you just not always see on the first look...

Sorry if there's any mistakes, English is not my first language.

How do you get laid with literature? I doubt you guys couldn't do it just as well without it.

Helped me seem more attractive.

Platonic and Stoic philosophies unironically kept me from killing myself.

It helped me seduce girls who has interest in letterature or art in general. I think it makes you somewhat sophisticated, or helps to be/look like you are. i'm pretty ugly but I'm confident. Without litterature it would be harder for me to get laid I think.

*seducing
*litterature

Literature in this case is just a neutral tool, it could have been films or paintings or whatever. You didn't learn anything specifically from books.

only thing i've learned is there are better writers out there than myself.

>For example some kids in the US were made to read books after putting racist graffiti on a historic building. Could 'punishments' like this be a good deterrent?

If high school english taught me anything it's that you can't force someone to engage with literature, they have to actually want to.

>Not really. I don't enjoy reading literature, I only do it for the social capital and appearance of being cultured.
Same. Nobody really cares about literature in itself.

That was my point in mentioning Bach---that the sublime, the ideal Beauty of the greatest arts is enough, no didactics necessarily required.

Literature is how I learned geography and persuasive rhetoric, as well as myriad facts who's origins in my psyche are now obscure to me.

Any book of sufficient difficulty will contain some facts you probably didn't know.

so kill yourself?

Salinger was the catalyst to the cynicism I now hold dear. It transformed itself from edgy teenager ideals to a wall I sit high on. DFW taught me my sadness wasn't true depression. Wallace also taught me a lot more things about writing that I've tried to apply to my own work. A lot of the mandatory reading in high school taught me not to be a sheep. Huxley taught me about drugs and other dimensions. Kate Chopin gave me a picture of a woman's mind to experience. Siddhartha taught me how to chill the fuck out about things in general.

A lot of my friends who don't read don't know how to process their emotions healthily, or come to me for advice when they're at a crossroad. This is where life experience would be handy, but when you (I) read about author's problems and solutions and thought processes it's like their thinking has been absorbed and can be applied to different situations in the real world. Books change your mindset.

So yeah, they've helped me.