Ive been tagged by Tyler to name 10 books that have affected me. The rules are typically that you cant think too hard about them, they just stick out in your mind, etc. The metric Im using is a little different - what books stand out as milestones of personal development? Whether marking my departure from one system of thought into another, demonstrating some hope gained or a skeptical disease contracted, or capturing some sense of psychological homelessness, the following books are firm beacons standing amidst the flux of my transient identity. 1 - The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, the LOTR trilogy - the imaginative scope of these books was one of my earliest platforms for really experiencing language in a personal and beautiful way. 2 - Brave New World (Huxley) - read freshman year of high school; basically annihilated my complicit faith in contemporary society by extrapolating the worst instincts in science, technology, and social engineering. Enter paranoia. 3 - The Gay Science (Nietzsche) - On the list less because of its particular impact than that of Nietzsches overall thought. Reading this book was a literal coming to terms with the forces of doubt, fear, and loss of identity that I had been facing, and remains in my mind part of the key to my own self-explication. I dont feel mature enough to tackle this book yet, and so it stands both as a point of departure and destination for this phase of my development 4- The Republic (Plato); Politics (Aristotle) - listed together bc of their similar themes and bc I read them in the same class (shout out for PTCD). Nietzsche is great, but given my spiritual infancy and cowardice, he was (re: is) too daunting to help me confidently understand the world and myself. Plato and Aristotle refocused me on what could actually be known, with confidence, from the natural world. By aiding my understanding of politics, they neutralized the fear and paranoia that Huxley had introduced to me. By discoursing on the human soul, they helped me reaffirm those aspects of Christian theology and all spirituality (in the secular sense of the word) which I had fallen away from, in order to believe in a best mode of life, and to recognize and respect it in myself. 5 - Democracy in America (Tocqueville) - while the Greeks palliated my Huxlean fear of modern society by contextualizing it in political philosophy, this was largely an intellectual comfort, quieting my head but not my heart. Hence Tocqueville, who writes much nearer to our times, was a great comfort, affirming those fears which I had felt intuitively from childhood (tyranny of majority, obsession over material interests, factionalism, decay of traditional values + love of novelty, etc). With full sappiness, I can say that it was with Tocqueville that I learned again how to respect and even love America, despite her flaws. 6 - The Daodejing - like Nietzsche, mostly in here for the system of thought it represents, that being, to me: an acknowledgment of the transience of all things, hence the futility of all will. The West, for all its ability to see nature as static and unchanging, is restless herself, always chasing some goal or righting some wrong, always leaving home to find another; the Ancient East was to me the yin to this yang, seeing in nature only constant comings-to and ceasings-of being along a common way (or Dao). There is no maxim of religion or jurisprudence to be drawn from this way; it simply is. While I am attracted to the rationalism and right-oriented will of the West, I also am kin with this simpler view of the world, or at least can superimpose it on those moments of mystical wonder and awareness which are, after all, more viscerally true to me than any written philosophical tract. The Dao is on this list finally as a challenge: how to unite the instinct for movement and for stillness, for the novel and the familiar, for the rational and sensible, thought and feeling, within myself? Which brings me to... 7 - (all by Hermann Hesse:) Narcissus and Goldmund, Demian, Siddhartha, and Beneath the Wheel; Ive placed these together because they deal with similar themes, and the common theme of this list: discovering, knowing, and being yourself. Whether an internal question (how to compromise the poetic and rational instincts), or an external one (how to know what true love or friendship is? What should one do with their life? Who am I?), Hesse deals with it. Best served chilled, in a cozy armchair, with a side of Nietzsche. [8-10: reserved for future existential wanderings] I waive my right to tag.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 21:47:59 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015