Would you rather:
A) write a couple fairly well received books when you're young, make some decent money from it, enjoy a comfy interesting life, but have your writings basically forgotten by the time you are old
or
B) work shit jobs while struggling to write a book well into middle age, get it published after many years of trying, hardly anyone reads it, die poor and nameless but your book becomes a classic decades after your death and you are still cited hundreds of years later
>implying I'm looking for approval
if you dont answer b you need to leave this board
Would you pick A or B?
B because I can then enjoy my posthumous fame from heaven.
Who cares? either way you die nameless. The options are functionally identical from a Veeky Forums perspective.
Ok
A
I don't ever need to be widely acclaimed, I don't really care
Now the choice you've presented to me isn't even a choice. It is a death sentence either way. That said, if you ask me whether I favour gold over glory then I say glory every time. The only thing left to do is define glory, at least for myself. On the one hand I look at the notion of glory and immortality through posterity's memory as misguided and futile, and yet at the same time it seems as good a thing as any to devote myself to. I just finished Hunger and all through it I felt a little ashamed of my own meagre output as I am living in marvelous conditions in comparison to the main character. I have the tools and the economic situation to set down opuses so magnum they do indeed last centuries, but why would I value those generations so far down? Yes, they will be pinnacles like we digital-age children are pinnacles on mankind's plateaus, the crests in the wave, and they will never notice it. Whether the work is praised in its time or way down the line by few or many, should matter not to me. I'll write it for myself and no one else. At least, I'll start out that way, just writing for myself. Inevitably it will not be in my hands anymore, but even though we lose our rights to our work after a certain fixed number of years, that initial writing, wholly ours, can never be taken from us.
Now that I've arrived at how I feel, I would have to have to go with A. God knows it's what the past's starving writers would've wanted. I see glory as in ephemerality, not eternity. I see this earth in my fingers as something to frolick in, not to shape and grow and build monuments on.
I choose A. If I kill myself after having a string of well-received books, I'll be canonized regardless.