@SoundDobad I know this may sound petty, but I can’t stand it when people put photoshop a meth pipe in my mouth. A crack pipe doesn’t have that little bowl at the end. This is why we can’t trust AI. Please make the appropriate edit. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
The thick of the middle ages is frankly every bit as alien as the high classical age.
We have less in common with the people of 1000 AD than with the people of 200 AD.
Likewise the people of 1000 AD had more in common with the people of 500 BC than with us, or with the people of 200 ad, or of 1600 ad.
"The West" is not a medieval construct but an early modern construct. We are completely defined not necessarily by Greece and Rome themselves but by our reflexive rediscovery of them and our *aspirations* towards them.
The classical people themselves were very pessimistic and backwards-looking; The spiritual heart of the post-roman West is that the Renaissance gave us an idea not just that things had been better, but that they could be better again. To be a Westerner is to have faith in the power of Reason not just to deliver you from a fallen world but to elevate the world itself. This ethos is neither strictly hellenist nor strictly christian.
sad Japanese man literature (Mishima, Dazai etc) is so effortlessly self-absorbed and raw and convincing that you really have to be careful with it. Read No Longer Human at the wrong time and you'll be thinking yeahhh. Drunk and sexy and sad and smarter than everyone. Thats me