Existential Angst in Half Price Books.
I was walking through a bookstore, and found myself looking around at all the sections I normally walk past, blithely ignoring them. Antiques & Collectibles, Architecture, Biography & Autobiography, Body Mind & Spirit, Cooking, Education, Gardening, Ghost, History, Legal, Literary Criticism, Medical, Music, Occult, Pets, Philosophy, Poetry, Psychological, Religion, Transportation, Self-Help, Sports, True Crime, Westerns...
And I thought “You’re trying to break out of your walled garden, to understand other people. Why are you ignoring these other topics, that lie outside your interests?”
And I was really daunted by the size of that problem. To me, most of those topics are utter tripe. But in floor upon floor, room upon room, stack upon stack of shelves upon shelves, people have scribed the knowledge of their lives. The pearls of wisdom they most wanted to pass on.
There’ll be new wisdom in some of them, and in others, ignorance that would at least let me see where they were coming from and see their point of view.
But there’s so much knowledge there. And I have such a short life. And even with an infinite life, I couldn’t read it faster than it’s produced.
So I left with four books from stacks I always visit anyway: on C programming, ethics in computing, physics in computing, and an evolution one by Grandma.
And I thought “You’re trying to break out of your walled garden, to understand other people. Why are you ignoring these other topics, that lie outside your interests?”
And I was really daunted by the size of that problem. To me, most of those topics are utter tripe. But in floor upon floor, room upon room, stack upon stack of shelves upon shelves, people have scribed the knowledge of their lives. The pearls of wisdom they most wanted to pass on.
There’ll be new wisdom in some of them, and in others, ignorance that would at least let me see where they were coming from and see their point of view.
But there’s so much knowledge there. And I have such a short life. And even with an infinite life, I couldn’t read it faster than it’s produced.
So I left with four books from stacks I always visit anyway: on C programming, ethics in computing, physics in computing, and an evolution one by Grandma.