1. I Love Mormons
2. Way of the Wild Heart
3. The Complete Idiot's Guide to World Religions
4. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
5. Blue Like Jazz
6. The Story of Philosophy
and currently reading
7. Motley Fool Investment Guide
8. Orthodoxy
I'd guess that's going on 3500-4000 pages of material of all non-fiction. Giggidy goo- that's how I get the ladies.
Anywho, I said that I would post this, and post it I shall. The following is from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and I really identify with it right now.
First, a summary of the book: A philosophical autobiography disguised as a motorcyle adventure across America.
A quick read on the relatively mysterious author is well worth the 60 seconds it will take.
Robert M. Pirsig
Anywho, this is a passage in the book as they begin to ascend into the mountains and as their trip ascends to high altitude he gradually begins speaking about a different kind of high country, the "high country of the mind".
"Few people travel here. There's no real profit to be made from wandering through it, yet like this high country of the material world all around us, it has its own austere beauty that to some people make the hardships of traveling through it seem worthwhile.
In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the enormous magnitude of questions asked , and to the answers proposed to these questions. The sweep goes on and on and on so obviously much further than the mind can grasp one hesitates even to go near for fear of getting lost in them and never finding one's way out."
If you've ever read deeply into philosophy you know exactly what Pirsig is writing about and I think he says it very poetically, but very accurately. I think the majority floats through life without real, open-minded (I mean completely open-minded) questioning.
If you've got another few minutes and you've already clipped your toenails and got all the lint out of your bellybutton with a golf pencil, read this story of "The Good Brahmin" by Voltaire, a lovable frenchman who also possessed one of the great minds of all time.
"I wish I had never been born!" the Brahmin remarked.
"Why so?" said I.
"Because," he replied, "I have been studying these forty years, and I find that it has been so much time lost...I believe that I am composed of matter, but I have never been able to satisfy myself what it is that produces thought. I am even ignorant whether my understanding is a simple faculty like that of walking or digesting, or if I think with my head in the same manner as I take hold of a thing with my hands...I talk a great deal, and when I have done speaking I remain confounded and ashamed of what I have said."
The same day I had a conversation with an old woman, his neighbor. I asked her if she had ever been unhappy for not understanding how her soul was made? She did not even comprehend my question. She had not, for the briefest moment in her life, had a thought about these subjects with which the good Brahmin had so tormented himself. She believed in the bottom of her heart in the metamorphoses of Vishnu, and provided she could get some of the sacred water of the Ganges in which to make her ablutions, she thought herself the happiest of women. Struck with the happiness of this poor creature, I returned to my philosopher, whom I thus addressed:
"Are you not ashamed to be thus miserable when, not fifty yards from you, there is an old automaton who thinks of nothing and lives contented?"
"You are right," he replied. "I have said to myself a thousand times that I should be happy if I were but as ignorant as my old neighbor; and yet it is a happiness which I do not desire."
This reply of the Brahmin made a greater impression on me than anything that had passed.
I really like Voltaire
-Brett
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