Monday, July 30th, 2007
BOOKS ARE SIGNPOSTS ON THE ROAD OF LIFE
“I cannot live without books”
– Thomas Jefferson
First, I’d like to thank Dr. Barnett and Dan of tdaxp for the kind remarks and links the past few days. Both men have often provoked me to new thoughts or reconsidered views and it is nice to know that I can return the favor on occasion.
Tom had a post Sunday entitled ” Why the grand strategist/visionary needs the discipline of books” that echoed something I’ve long believed. Something Lexington Green, in his enviably book-lined home, probably would agree with,
a) First, there’s really no substitute for a good “hard” book.
b) Fiction becomes a guilty pleasure.
Perhaps, the physicists and mathematicians among us ( Von, Shane, Wiggins) will put a word in for the elegance of the mathematical equation, but for me, the supremacy of the book reigns without a rival. As I reflect on the evolution of my thinking as a teen and an adult, inevitably there are many books and a handful of people who leap to mind. Many, many, books and very, very, few people.
As much as I love history, the best reading I have done, in terms of determined, sustained, thought, involved philosophy and economics – Aristotle, Plato, Marx, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Keynes, Galbraith, Von Mises, Von Hayek, Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Machiaveli, Kuhn -because it trained my mind to accept the discipline of formal logic. Logic is invaluable for a rational mind but wisdom is discerning logic’s limitations of functioning within paradigms and that the paradigms themselves are tools for the mind to understand a part of reality; and not one of these paradigms is sufficient to encompass the whole. You have to synthesize, learn, adapt – there is no point at which you ” rest” or become complacent with your expertise.
The joy is in the journey and not in the destination.