BOOKS
The Last Samurai is amazing, astonishing, challenging, heart-warming, frustrating and interesting. It is easily the best modern novel that I have read in a very long time, if not ever. It stirs in me an insatiable hunger for new knowledge, and my mind is now filled with fantasies about the ways that I will teach myself greek and japanese, and learn how to play the piano, and learn how to gamble, and of course become a travel writer which is my life's ambition anyway. All that said, I think there is something intrinsically superficial about the way my mind and my emotions are stimulated. Even in philosophy class, reading things like Nietzche and Hegel and Aristotle and Plato, I am most attracted to, and most convinced by, the arguments that lay out appealing examples. If a philosopher's writing style is roundabout and hard to follow I am afraid I get bored quite easily. If there is something within the text that I can immediately identify with, however, the opposite becomes true. Should I feel guilty that I am influenced to read new books or listen to new music or find out new things mostly based on my opinions of the people who reccomend them to me? Despite my insistince and deepest hopes that I am, on some level, a deeply introspective and rational and creative person, more often than not I fear this is not at all the case.