Where did the great writers go?

        What do I find to love?  To fill my time with? Books, my wife, a few people, and my thoughts, are my most pleasurable things. Each day comes and goes. But when I look back on my day, and find myself the happiest, it is when I have sat and read, talked with my wife for hours, and got to spend my time thinking over what I read, and where those thoughts lead me for the day.

       It is rare to find me reading the work of a writer that is alive today. So few current writers have found anything new to write about, and their style does not touch what was done over one hundred years ago. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Crowley, Nietzsche, and Heidegger changed literature as it was known. They took the narrative and found new ways to express it and bestow information upon us that enlightened us.


       Tolstoy told history like no other thought it could be done. Dostoevsky finally got one deeply into the mind of his characters. One knew just what they were thinking without needing to be told. In The Idiot we could see and feel the interactions of the characters, not just from what actually took place in his words, but from what they were thinking and feeling. We knew the emotions and internal conflicts more than any other part of this amazing novel. We almost didn’t care about the action until it finally exploded, and forced us take account of its happenings.

       Crowley and Nietzsche made us question the world and all our former religious beliefs. No longer did we just go into our religious congregations and simply follow what we were being told for face value any more. Both were deemed the Anti-Christ for looking into what was actually there, deeply and philosophically. No longer would the interpretations of the pulpit be solely satisfactory. They refused to simply believe what was told to them, and  taking the Buddha’s advice, questioned everything. And if that was not shocking enough; their use of language put them far above any other writer during their time. Reading their work has a flow that did not come out of any other writer. Even the headiest concepts of Nietzsche just flowed without hesitation. While any other writer would have stumbled to find the right words (and how to connect these ideas onto a page with cohesion)  this man knew just how to write so one is not only drawn into beautiful and poignant ideas, but it awed by its flow and perfect decorum of word usage. One’s only regret of reading him will be that there is not enough! The heart aches for more but there is none!

       Heidegger took the ideas of all the great thinkers before him. He gathered all of them together and created a new frame work of use; a new and useful system that awed and transfixed its readers. And if the ideas and intermingling of these thoughts and practices were not enough, he changed German word usage to what it is today. These changes not only affected the readers of his country, and his time, but changed language around the world. “Nesses” added to the end of a word would not impact us as it does today if were not for his writings; and that is only one example. Even translations of books, in other languages, are now translated with the current way of word usage brought about by Heidegger’s sentence and word structure. Even those who were too simpleminded to understand his theories benefited by this man’s ability to write and express himself in printed word.



Will literature one day return to these great minds and writers? Or will we suffer to be spoon fed by simpletons and baboons of the human languages forever? I only hope we return to seeing what the greatest did, and learn.

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.