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.

Simone de Beauvoir & me.

Of late I have been reading the works of Simone de Beauvoir and can not help but almost feel as if I am in love. To give you a little bit of her back ground, if you are unfamiliar with her, she was the woman that spent much of her life being Jean-Paul Sartre's main love. Each of them had many lovers other than each other but found that they spent most of their time and works with each other. They would have been married but Sartre belived that that was much too bourgeois and they never did.

I have been reading one volume of her autobiography entitled Force of Circumstance II. In it she speaks out against the country around her. They are engaged in a war with Algeria and the French army is torturing, raping, and slaughtering people of a poor and underindustrialized nation. She speaks out very venhemently against these atrocities and is found to be Un-French by her fellow countrymen. She goes as far as to denounce her home counrty and leaves it all the while doing her journalism for her and Sartre's paper fueled with articles about the horrors taking place in the hands of the French military.

I could not help feeling just what she is writing about in connection with the current war in Iraq. Our soldiers are doing just what we were told we would be liberating the Iraqi people from. We are only liberating them from their lives; if they are lucky. And one should know that I feel that life in the only thing that should never be sacrificed. It only comes about one time and living it is everything that you ever do.

Simone also speaks of an account she had with her brother-in-law who was trying the rationalize what was being done durring this war. He tried to say that the torture was only in issolated instances and that the military was only acting in ways that it needs to to combat a savage land and equally savage people. I heard these same things told to me durring my political ravings of administrations past and wars current. When she descibes what she was feeling physically durring, and right after, those conversations with her brother-in-law I could not help but know in absolute detail exactly what she was feeling.

I would suggest her writings to any one with any sort of leftist inclinations, even a slight acknowlegment of woman's equal rights, enjoys great women writers, or is one who takes interest in existentialistc philosophy and its application to real life situations. She is an amazing writer and to know that she wrote these works long before it was en vouge to do so by a woman makes these writings that much more powerful and impressive.