Thinking, and reading, to find out why.

If I were to say that I can feel when I should turn to a certain book, you would say I am crazy. But I can. I reach for one book, it will push me away and I will feel a repulsion and metaphysical sting. But when I reach out to read another book, or passage, I can feel myself being drawn to it. It is almost as if I was in connection with the writer and somehow am drawn magickally to the correct passage at just the right time.

This week I was drawn to Schopenhauer. It was perfect for me to read that he felt that reading books did not give ideas but only allowed the reader into the mind frame of that writer at the time of his writings of that passage. To recieve and have ideas are totally different thing. Ones need to be in the world around them to be able to truly have original thought.

Then, I read Nietzsche, and he said very similar things, but he spoke against scholars who would go through 200 books in a day and just glean a little bit of information. They were a wealth of knowledge, but of no real use because they are only telling the ideas of others they have memorized. I know when I was reading voraciously I felt that same feeling. These were great ideas but they were not my own. Pirsig wrote about needing to know the ground work of philosophy, but there is so much of it that it would take two life times just to get into the information. That time frame would only allow one to get the ground work without ever getting into their own thoughts.


Time to write mine.