Thursday, April 12, 2007

Genusfrog [ 9:25 am ] | 3 comments

ESSENTIAL READING



I recently had the pleasure of meeting a guy with a bookcase full of essential reading: darwin's origin of species, i-ching's book of changes, hitler's mein kampf, the KJV bible, the mahabharata, and all four vedas. we talked about the hindu epics, the bible, aliens and angels and truth. a few days later, he asks me if i had mein kampf in my library. i said no. he said he had an extra copy and wanted to find an appreciative owner. I accepted the gift.

and so, that night, i began wanting to collect all these books... these books with bold, sometimes brash, sometimes absurd, and almost always compelling claims to truth. these books that in a bygone day, attempted to explain the world as it was then, and on this day, accounts for the world as it is now. cover them and you probably understand the mind of three-quarters of the people you'll ever meet. so essential are these texts that perhaps the entirety of world's history of ideas lie between the pages of no more than twenty books.

the eight books above are the ones that interest me the most. and so, on top of my recent gift, i'm gonna aspire towards owning a copy of each of these classics: sigmund freud's studies on hysteria, karl marx's das kapital, the mahabharata, plato's republic, darwin's origin of species, mao tse tung's little red book, and nietszche's thus spoke zarathustra.

but will i really read these things? some of them are really huge. i found a pdf of das kapital online and it was massive. when i saw how big it was i felt the same crestfalling feeling that i felt the day i realised how big crime and punishment was. man, how am i ever gonna plough through these things? add to that fact, i'm a slow reader. it's preposterous to think i should own them.

i was talking about this recently, and athalia said that i should get books that digest all these primary sources and sort of spit them back out in a more concise way. it makes sense. i think i would benefit more from reading some oxford companion to freud than ploughing through his seminal works. i'd get my head around it faster. someone learned would have helped me chew on the spongy meat and it sure as all would go down faster. i've flicked through those oxford companions - they're really nicely put together.

but there's still something wrong about that. for all its appeal, reading the essential thinkers through some second-hand guide is like discovering the beatles through the red and blue albums. i discovered the beatles through the anthologies, and while that was a bit closer to the actual, organic thing, i always envy the folks from the sixties who bought their albums one by one, fully digesting rubber soul before moving on to revolver. you can't digest rubber soul over three number 1s on a compilation. so maybe the same thing is at work here.

there's something quaint, something poignant about reading the words as the thinker thought. something pure about that indivisible connection between the original speaker and the eventual listener. something unadulterated, immediate and precious about the primary piece. sure, it's fodder for pretentious poseur pop-philosophers, still i'd risk of looking like a wannabe if it means hearing some of these guys speak for themselves.

and so, i will begin my little adventure in itty bitty steps. i'm not sure which to get first, but it's exciting. maybe i'll start with nietszche.

Labels: philosophy