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5 Responses to “Two Books”

1. Lexington Green Says:
   September 20th, 2008 at 5:29 pm

   I looked at Epictetus today.  I have his meditations in a compendium volume here. 
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   Too hard.
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   I think that philosophy is a young man’s game, or an old man’s game, but is incompatible with work and children in the house.  It is too intellectually demanding and cannot be read profitably in bits and pieces.
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   But I hope you can hack through it.  I like to think that someone can … .
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   Once my last kid goes to college, if I am alive and not senile, I want to take on Aquinas.  If that fails, I will take it up personally with him in Heaven.

2. zen Says:
   September 21st, 2008 at 3:34 am

   Very interesting reflection Lex.
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   I tend to agree with you. I did a heavy load of philo and economics in my twenties – Plato, Aristotle, Machiaveli, Kant, Marx, Mill, Han Fei-Tzu, Mencius, de Tocqueville, Burke, Lao-Tzu, von Hayek, Musashi, Xenophon, von Mises, Cicero, Ayn Rand, Galbraith, Friedman, Smith, a little Aquinas (very little), some Clausewitz, Montesquieu, Polybius, Locke, Keynes and others that I’m too lazy to get up and find on my shelf.  It was good for my brain but reading the books that scare the masses trailed off once children arrived.
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   I’d also say that the hard reading is harder because of the amount of chaos going on in mid-life. The noise, kids, cell phones, TV, dogs, Mrs. Z. reminding me of the things that need doing – can be tremendous and the computer is a too frequent distraction from good books. It is easy to put them aside "for later". Too easy, I’m afraid. I do not watch TV ( except DVDs) so that’s not a problem but I have distractions enough.
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   Here’s the good news. One grad level class was all it took to "snap" my brain back – just from forcing myself to read hard and fast on a few books from the course that I’d probably never have picked up unless they were required. The old discipline came right back, much like the adage about never forgetting to ride a bicycle.  I had a chance, a few days ago, to pick up Karl Popper’s vol. 1 of The Open Society and it’s Enemies in a bookstore while I was killing some time – now I can’t wait to read all of it. A brilliant thinker, Popper. Should have read him twenty years ago.
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   I imagine that if you had to teach or even take a law class and do some prelim reading for the syllabus that you would snap back just as quickly and easily – especially given the type of reading law school requires.

3. Lexington Green Says:
   September 21st, 2008 at 4:38 am

   Agreed absolutely about the chaos.   Sounds pretty much like my situation.
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   Agreed also about the no TV. 
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   The computer is too much of a distraction. 
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   I decided not to blog until after the election — I was tending toward hysteria, and adding nothing original or of value, and who needs to read that anyway?    So, I am doing a little reading and no writing (present comment excepted), and resolving to read instead when I get the itch to turn on the computer.
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   I have had book groups over the  years.  We got through Tocqueville in slow motion.  That was very rewarding. 
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   So, hard books can be gotten through.  Still, the very hardest books I have ever tackled are not possible under current circumstances.  The stuff my Dad reads — hardcore math and science — I will go to my grave and never be able to fathom.  The older I get, the more I see that this is like living and dying as a semi-literate savage in this day and age.   That is where the serious action really is.  Perhaps my kids will do better. 
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   I agree that if I had to, I could make sense of Epictetus.  I have never let myself get entirely out of reading fairly difficult books.  But I am certainly not at the level I was at during college at U of C.  A few years ago I found my exam blue book for a course on Wittgenstein I took.  I got an A.  It was a level of thinking and analysis that I sometimes reach at work, but never from books I read now.

   Academic level history books is about as hard as I can handle these days. 

   Do what you can. 

4. Yours Truly Says:
   September 21st, 2008 at 9:17 am

   LG & Zen :

   Gentlemen, it’s a good thing you’ve never even touched on French theoretical writers. They’ll really MESS UP your brains. Just try readin’ Jean Baudrillard or Felix Guattari & Gilles Deleuze.

   I’m still tryin’ to figure out what Deleuze & Guattari are tryin’ to tell the world.

   ???

5. zen Says:
   September 22nd, 2008 at 2:29 am

   Hi YT,
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   You are correct, no modern French theoreticals – Montesquieu, de Tocqueville and de Custine were about as "modern" as I can claim to be. College class excerpts of Derrida, Marcuse etc. don’t count, just whole books.