(Nov 17, 2017 01:42 AM)confused2 Wrote: [ -> ]A library. A book that is read captures the reader as much as the reader captures the book. You can't unread a book. I don't have a library but the books I have read I carry with me.
I went to an estate sale recently. The man must have been an engineer with a mild interest in physics. There were tons of very expensive books. Of course, I had that area all to myself because not many people have that sort of interest. I started combing through them and then noticed another man next to me. He started doing the same thing. I could tell that he didn’t have much knowledge in either field by the books that he was choosing. I quickly searched for the names that I knew and loved. I paid for them and asked the lady if she would guard them while I continued looking around. She put a sold sign on them. When I returned, they were gone. I looked around and saw the guy putting them in his car. I ran out but it was too late. The lady said that he owned a used book shop nearby but didn’t know the name of it. I estimated the value of those books even at used prices to be close to a thousand dollars or so. I really wanted those books. They were filled with bookmarks, personal notes, and highlights.
My grandmother was an author. Her books were like that. My books are like that. I used to try to figure what the significance of an underline, parenthesis, or a circled sentences may have had to the reader. Why that equation? An ah-ha moment, perhaps. Something related to a project or something not entirely understood that required further investigation? My grandmother’s scribbles were obvious. She was an author. She was always piecing things together for her next book, but a stranger, not so clear. One may never know the significance of a highlight but that is exactly why I don’t loan out my books. They're personal and that's why I remove the jackets and keep the titles hidden. I’ve had people grab books right out of my hand before. Complete strangers trying to determine what type of person I am.
A few weeks ago, I was standing in line and overheard a conversation. A woman, who seemed to know him, asked a guy, who was gazing out the window, if he was okay. He said, "Yeah, I’m just waiting for a ride." He laughed and then said that he probably looked like he was having an existential crisis or something.
I wondered what people would think if they saw me gazing out a window. Would they know that I wasn’t actually looking out at all? That I was looking at the reflections between two double pain windows? That I was tracing the angles and noticing the sizes of the objects reflected back at me? No. They'd probably think I was sad, worried, or simply daydreaming about something altogether different.
You are what you read? If so, it should not be about how many, but which ones.
At one time, I was worried about Google’s algorithms. Would they become so tailored to my preferences that my search results would end up becoming even more biased overtime? Alain de Botton was discussing his new book about the news at a google conference. He said that he thought the current bandwidth of information was clogged up with what you might call orphaned pieces of information. He compared our current consumption to having forty novels constantly presented to us where we’re allowed to read one sentence, and then the novel is removed, and another one is presented, and so forth.
Lets’ compare this to special relativity. Say you read an analogy and then another. You’re curious. So, you read a book. You may or may not understand an equation. You wonder why this equation was even needed. None of these ideas seem intuitive. So, you gather even more information. Finally, you decide to take a course on the subject and then all of a sudden the instructor says something that inflicts an ah-ha moment. Not that you were consciously aware of your question or even your lack of understanding. You simply had bits and pieces of information rolling around in your subconscious mind. When the information was presented in a structured fashion, all of those bits and pieces came together.
You know...I think that people experience more anxiety today than ever before, but not because some of the old narratives are no longer useful. We need to make sense out of our surroundings, and in order to do so, we need narratives, and this is what is lacking in the way that information is currently being presented to us.
P.S., I don’t think that you can judge a book by its cover or a reader by her books. You’d have to know what they were after and how it relates to their narrative.
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