All this shit the Boomers say about Millennials not doing our duty to keep the birthrate up Sorry I just don't have it in me to provide you more fuel for the machine Maybe it's better if the machine just shuts down
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I guess I'm old fashioned, I greatly prefer to "Good Bones" Philip Larkin's "This Be the Verse", which is much blunter and harsher about what he thinks the solution ispic.twitter.com/JFxUOLb0zs
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Hm. I think the nihilism is cynical and self serving, ultimately. Good Bones is about the knife edge of hope and lies, about the ambivalence of not giving up, of at least trying.
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Replying to @digiwonk @arthur_affect
But the writer of Good Bones is not "at least trying", she's expecting her children to try FOR her. She's bringing innocent people into the world to suffer, and then lying to them about it.
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I don’t read it as her not trying or as bringing people in to suffer? I read it as her acknowledging that the great beauty of the world is not enough, and that it’s impossible to protect your children from the horror of it.
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But i mean, the solution to that is to NOT HAVE CHILDREN. (I know we don't agree on this.) The worldview expressed in the poem is, to me, one of utterly monstrous and premeditated cruelty.
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Replying to @iridienne @schanoes and
I don't feel like creating entirely new life, which will inevitably be miserable, for the purpose of *possibly* "making the world better" is reasonable or acceptable.
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Replying to @iridienne @schanoes and
It's weird - I've chosen not to have children and I acknowledge the world's misery, but I think the world is pretty damn spectacular as well and don't object to wanting to show it to others. And on the third hand I love the Larkin poem and find it very true.
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Replying to @pinguinus @iridienne and
The thing about deepening like a coastal shelf is that you can move both ways: inshore or offshore.
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Replying to @pinguinus @iridienne and
I like both poems too, tbh. I think the Good Bones narrator doesn’t think life is only fucked up misery—she talks about the “delicious” ways she’s shortened her life. I think the Larkin narrator does, but his obsessive focus on the nuclear family unit is...flawed.
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I dunno man You don't have to literally be a parent to fuck up the next generation, lots of people do it, and I've personally chosen to not participate in any of it It's why long ago I gave up on the idea of being a teacher
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Replying to @arthur_affect @pinguinus and
I agree, but I don’t think Larkin is speaking metaphorically, given his last line. You can choose not to have kids, but you can’t really choose whether or not you play a role in making a society/culture that fucks then up and/or helps them bloom.
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Replying to @schanoes @arthur_affect and
BAM! Yeah this. Larkin is all those guys I went to university with, super big into postmodernist relativism and the death of meaning, then gliding into management.
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