The Literary Lifestyle

Constructing Your Prison

As reading and writing are solitary pastimes, many heavy readers are driven to reading because they are maladjusted socially to begin with. Of course the more extensively they read the more thoroughly the underlying problem exacerbates. What becomes of him then; When he finds himself in a niche so deep and so occluded from the everyday, defined by a hobby he at once feels elated by, guilty about, and anxious over?

If he’s been reading the right things; he’ll long since have put to bed all manner of existential bogymen and grandeur. He knows he knows no emotion so sophisticated that it goes unknown by all but him. In fact, he probably thinks there is a deep emotional relativity amongst humans, ever acclimated to different baselines. But unless he escaped into the academy, where all behave as perversely as he, he is now more a product of isolation and Byzantium than ever before, soon to be an island.

He has engineered his own prison and now must live a life which will accommodate its design. This is where the literary lifestyle comes into play.

The Literal Lifestyle

The lifestyle is a combination of habits and opinions that are by no means exclusive to /lit/. They are the manner of dispossessed, awkward, idle, affected, literary young men all over all time. While the mode has literary roots in characters as diverse as A.J. Prufrock, Ignatius Riley, Don Quixotic, Suttree, and Steven Dedalus, it is perhaps Oblomov who is the paterfamilias. In so much as Oblomov epitomizes the most extreme form of disengagement from the world, he is the Godhead and essence of the style.

A man deep in the life of letters grows remote; his physical sensitivities dulled; his mental sensitivities overrun, overwoke, reduce all constructed objects to relational ironies. This remoteness doesn’t always, but often can, translate into a physical remoteness. One deep in the guts of the literary lifestyle may well be deep in the guts of others, but inside he will know himself as nothing other than estranged. He wants to tell people of the things he’s read but knows others will not abide his pretentious impinging. He will actively avoid flaunting his powerlevel, and hide his stack of critical texts on Ulysses whenever others are about.

The Literary lifestyle owns much to Flâneur culture. When not reading, resting idly, pontificating, masturbating, napping, the lifestyller may be found strolling.

One active in the style must be a NEET. Though activity in the style at a given time need not preclude education or employment at some other point.

Other Common Characteristics

In general the more literary a man’s lifestyle, the less he finds politics an actionable or engaging space.

In general the more literary a man’s lifestyle, the more hedonistic his appetites, physical and aesthetic.

In general the more literary a man’s lifestyle, the more qualified and less general his elitism becomes.

In general the more literary a man’s lifestyle, the more cultivated and gnostic his apostasy.

In general the more literary a man’s lifestyle, the more libertine his sensibilities.

In general the more literary a man’s lifestyle, the more perverse his tolerances.

In general the more literary a man’s lifestyle, the more less his wont of money.

In general the more literary a man’s lifestyle, the more ironic his dealings.