Compulsive reading
I'm working my way around the stack from 158 (Dewey Decimal) to about 292. This will carry me through the self-help section, philosophy, and comparative religion. I'll get to the 299's eventually, but there's a lot of history in that end of the 200's, and I'm really after the philosophy at the moment. I keep thinking of an old Garfield cartoon in which he was standing on a table surrounded by food and trying to find a metaphor. I think the punchline went something like, "I'm sure the meaning of life is here somewhere." In recent weeks, my reading list has included (in no particular order):
Seneca: On the Shortness of Life
Harold Kushner: How to Have a Meaningful Life
Tom Harpur: The Pagan Christ
Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus
David Adams Richards: God Is
Martha Beck: The Joy Diet
Judith E. Lief: Making Friends with Death
I promise that suicide is purely an academic issue. I started working on a comparison between Camus and Hamlet's "To Be..." speech last summer, after watching "Slings and Arrows" (an exquisite Canadian TV program which is worth the effort to track down). That Undiscovered Country that awaits us all... it haunts me. I'm not afraid of dying. I'm afraid of dying too soon. I'm not done yet. And I don't want to still be saying, "Just let me finish this..." on my day of reckoning, whenever it catches me. Or maybe I do... maybe that's part of the meaning, too?
Camus intrigues me, because he claims that suicide is the only truly serious philosophical question. Certainly, one of the things that catches me again and again is the fact that Virginia Woolf took her own life. Why? Why did a woman who seemed to have everything I strive for find it so desperate that she chose that path? This question comes up again and again as I read her work. Where did the meaning go wrong? I'm reading my way through her short fiction. It sparkles. It's incisive. It's compelling. She had love, she had a voice, she had talent... Oh, I weep for Virginia Woolf.
Anybody want to read any of those books to talk about them with me? The Myth of Sisyphus is really thin. :) And The Joy Diet was both practical and funny. And now it's late and I have to go to bed.
Seneca: On the Shortness of Life
Harold Kushner: How to Have a Meaningful Life
Tom Harpur: The Pagan Christ
Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus
David Adams Richards: God Is
Martha Beck: The Joy Diet
Judith E. Lief: Making Friends with Death
I promise that suicide is purely an academic issue. I started working on a comparison between Camus and Hamlet's "To Be..." speech last summer, after watching "Slings and Arrows" (an exquisite Canadian TV program which is worth the effort to track down). That Undiscovered Country that awaits us all... it haunts me. I'm not afraid of dying. I'm afraid of dying too soon. I'm not done yet. And I don't want to still be saying, "Just let me finish this..." on my day of reckoning, whenever it catches me. Or maybe I do... maybe that's part of the meaning, too?
Camus intrigues me, because he claims that suicide is the only truly serious philosophical question. Certainly, one of the things that catches me again and again is the fact that Virginia Woolf took her own life. Why? Why did a woman who seemed to have everything I strive for find it so desperate that she chose that path? This question comes up again and again as I read her work. Where did the meaning go wrong? I'm reading my way through her short fiction. It sparkles. It's incisive. It's compelling. She had love, she had a voice, she had talent... Oh, I weep for Virginia Woolf.
Anybody want to read any of those books to talk about them with me? The Myth of Sisyphus is really thin. :) And The Joy Diet was both practical and funny. And now it's late and I have to go to bed.