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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2973 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 14, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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I read Marble Cliffs after Forest Passage and Eumeswil, so perhaps it was easier for me to read his later works back into it

I just downloaded Forest Passage so maybe it will reveal more. I find Junger fascinating.

On Infinite Jest - I'm not sure it's that Wallace hates the reader, and more that he is desperate over the difficulty of genuine connection and communication in ironized postmodernity.

I'm definitely going to bug you about DFW more, I want to know this interpretation of things! I'm also kinda stuck on the masturbation of it all, is the entertainment just porn?

Plutarch's Lives: Perhaps the greatest historical work ever written? But also, not a true history - it's fundamentally a philosophical book about human character, human greatness, and human folly. Plutarch is concerned with what it is to be human, and what types of men make their mark on history, and his Lives are deeply-painted portraits of character.

This might have been about when I read it, but a big thing I got out of Plutarch was how the paired characters (Greek and Roman) were a concentrated historical effort to invent Greco-Roman cultural history, tying every great Roman to a great Greek. Everything you said too, and Plutarch was a genius writer, but the underlying political project was one of the biggest things that stuck with me. Plutarch used his literary and philosophical genius to forward his goals and ideas.

Contemporary alt-lit

If you had to recommend one novel to start, which would you recommend I begin with?

Forest Passage is the late Junger's most straightforward work (not to say it is straightforward!), and the closest thing to an anarch's manifesto. Hope you will enjoy and always happy to discuss.

I'm definitely going to bug you about DFW more, I want to know this interpretation of things! I'm also kinda stuck on the masturbation of it all, is the entertainment just porn?

So think about the Professional Conversationalist scene at the start, and then the conversation between the Wraith and Gately at the end - JOI is desperate to communicate, but he can't get past Hal's interior walls and really speak to him. The postmodern novelist is in the same predicament, nothing he writes can cross the walls of detachment within himself and the reader. He creates the Entertainment as a way to communicate, but it only produces all-consuming obsession (n.b. we never truly know if the Entertainment is absolute bliss, or if it's simply that withdrawal from it is immeasurably painful). I think the Entertainment is both the capacity of media/Substance consumption to consume human life, and also a sincere attempt from JOI to escape that. And it parallels the novel, in that a great novel like Infinite Jest (the same title) produces this obsessive desire to think about it but is at the same time a sincere attempt at a perhaps impossible human-to-human communication. Both the great novel and the Entertainment grab us by appealing to deep, primal aspects of human psychology (in the Entertainment, the Oedipal mother/baby/death stuff) but the question is if this can only be narcotizing, if the only path a novel opens is passive consumption, or if it can be a path to reaching Hal/you.

This might have been about when I read it, but a big thing I got out of Plutarch was how the paired characters (Greek and Roman) were a concentrated historical effort to invent Greco-Roman cultural history, tying every great Roman to a great Greek.

Yeah this is definitely a compelling reading. Interestingly, Leo Strauss argues (briefly, in his seminars) that Plutarch is esoterically trying to show the moral superiority of the Greeks over the Romans, or of the Classical era over more recent times - esoterically, because he lived under Rome and didn't want to offend them. I'm not sure I buy that, but will be looking for that on the next read. The element of it I do see is that Plutarch's Greeks are much more individuals, their vices and virtues are those of individuals, whereas most of the great Romans (Caesar being the exception, and Coriolanus/Mark Antony cautionary tales) are shaped more by their relationship to the State and the Mos Maiorum. Where the Romans put their individual greatness first, it tends to go wrong, whereas when the Greeks do it it tends to go better for them. But, by the time of Pyrrhus, that largely makes the Romans into better men than the Greeks, even if it may be less ideal a world from Plutarch's perspective.

If you had to recommend one novel to start, which would you recommend I begin with?

I would say Stop All The Clocks is probably the most paradigmatic. It's set in New York, it's got questions about art and AI, it's got the conspiracy angle. It also tones down the annoying tics that other similar novels have (I read three that all did the same bit about iPad tips being set too high, and the cod-Pynchon maximalism of a lot of these books never lands with me). Alternatively, pick up a copy of The End and get a buffet - they are print-only (though I believe pdfs used to be on their website), but you can preorder the next issue in the link from their Instagram bio.

P.S. You may enjoy this cartoon

Interestingly, Leo Strauss argues (briefly, in his seminars) that Plutarch is esoterically trying to show the moral superiority of the Greeks over the Romans, or of the Classical era over more recent times - esoterically, because he lived under Rome and didn't want to offend them.

I don't particularly think Plutarch would have to argue all that esoterically, the superiority of the men of the past over the men of the present was a truism of the ancients.

The element of it I do see is that Plutarch's Greeks are much more individuals, their vices and virtues are those of individuals, whereas most of the great Romans (Caesar being the exception, and Coriolanus/Mark Antony cautionary tales) are shaped more by their relationship to the State and the Mos Maiorum. Where the Romans put their individual greatness first, it tends to go wrong, whereas when the Greeks do it it tends to go better for them. But, by the time of Pyrrhus, that largely makes the Romans into better men than the Greeks, even if it may be less ideal a world from Plutarch's perspective.

I saw a twitter post that really confused me recently where someone said something along the lines of "Most of the time history is all about great important movements and forces and institutions but then you run into Julius Caesar and he just changes everything..." And I thought, really, Caesar? The guy who was like the fifth person in a row to try the exact the same thing? By the time we get to Caesar, we can reasonably say that men like Caesar is exactly what the state is producing.

And it parallels the novel, in that a great novel like Infinite Jest (the same title) produces this obsessive desire to think about it but is at the same time a sincere attempt at a perhaps impossible human-to-human communication. Both the great novel and the Entertainment grab us by appealing to deep, primal aspects of human psychology (in the Entertainment, the Oedipal mother/baby/death stuff) but the question is if this can only be narcotizing, if the only path a novel opens is passive consumption, or if it can be a path to reaching Hal/you.

Huh. That's an interesting angle. I was thinking about that earlier today shoveling snow, how reading a novel like that is inherently selfish in some ways, but then I only managed to finish it through a book club, so it was inherently social and connection based for me.

I don't particularly think Plutarch would have to argue all that esoterically, the superiority of the men of the past over the men of the present was a truism of the ancients.

Well, the idea that Greeks are better than Romans might have raised some hackles, and Plutarch did have his political career to think about. But I don't know the exact situation in Greece under the Flavian and Nerva-Antonine dynasties, it could have been that valorizing the Greeks under Hadrian was the classy thing to do. I suspect Strauss was reaching with that one, it was only a casual remark to students.

I saw a twitter post that really confused me recently where someone said something along the lines of "Most of the time history is all about great important movements and forces and institutions but then you run into Julius Caesar and he just changes everything..." And I thought, really, Caesar? The guy who was like the fifth person in a row to try the exact the same thing? By the time we get to Caesar, we can reasonably say that men like Caesar is exactly what the state is producing.

I tell my populist friends all the time that this is something to meditate on, that these things are long-term processes and we are definitely at the Gracchi stage rather than the Caesar one.

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