My list of books read in 2007 is on my downstair's computer. I read around 36, depending on what you'd count as full books.
My list of books read in 2007 is on my downstair's computer. I read around 36, depending on what you'd count as full books.
"Modern weapons can defend freedom, civilization, and life only by annihilating them. Security in military language means the ability to do away with the Earth."
-Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society
Been a couple years, but I remember the Tao Te Ching being exceptionally cryptic. I liked descriptions of it better than the text itself.
Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.
Yeah, the rating is kind of arbitrary. But I thought the philosophy was too simplistic, and, as Duncan noted, somewhat cryptic in style. (Yes, I'm aware that both the simplicity and the cryptic style are intentional and self-consistent.) I haven't read the whole of the Koran, and I'm not sure that I've even heard of the Zohar, but as for the Bible, Job, Ecclesiastes, the crucifixion, and Revelations get a 10; everything else is middlin'.Quoting monolith94 (view post)
I just listed everything of note, regardless of length. Some of the "books" that I listed are less than 20 pages long.
I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?
lists and reviews
I'l ltry to compile my list in the next few days.
"All right, that's too hot. Anything we can do about that heat?"
"Rick...it's a flamethrower."
Man, I don't rate films or books, but I'd give Job a 1 just on principle. I honestly cannot understand how that book is considered to have something significant, or even simplistically noble to say about suffering.
Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.
That was my initial reaction as well. However, God's reasoning, that he is right to cause suffering because he's God, eventually won me over. But seriously, I think his argument, that his divine plan cannot be understood by mere mortals, is in the end his only plausible defence. Of course, whether or not that divine plan is worth the tears of one tortured child, as she beats her breast and cries out to dear Father God, is debatable (hopefully you catch the Dostoevsky reference).
Anyway, I love how Satan just walks into God's meeting (coming "from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it") and convinces him to torture Job and destroy his family.
I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?
lists and reviews
Oh, I've read most everything Ivan says in that book at least twice.
The ending of Job is what infuriated me the most. It's as though that tortured child was magically given a bunch of dolls to play with, and everything was perfectly fine. I've read speculation that the ending was added on at some point. That seems likely to me.
Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.
Yeah, that ending is pretty silly.
I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?
lists and reviews
I fall somewhere in between Melville and monolith on Tao Te Ching. I also read it this year, and I agree that at times it can be too cryptic, but I thought the simplicity was perfect. It's from a far less jaded time, and there were passages in there that made me wish we could all go back and live with that frame of mind. It may not be possible, but it is certainly ideal. I found most of the book very satisfying spiritually.
Giving ratings to particularly old works of literature does seem odd to me. I gave The Epic of Gilgamesh three out of four stars, but I'm not sure if I really feel that way. It's like giving a rating to a cave painting. It defies rating.
I don't think you can draw those historical conclusions from the philosophy in the Tao Te Ching. After all, Sun-Tzu's The Art of War was written around the same time and place. And do we really want to go back to the Warring States period of China? It wasn't exactly sunshine and lollipops.
Anyway, why do you say that Lao Tzu's frame of mind is ideal? He wishes for the extermination of knowledge, and he states that the populace should be uneducated. He has a perfectly reasonable metaphysical basis for this idealization of ignorance, but I can't say it strikes me as ideal.
I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?
lists and reviews
By "go back and live that way", I didn't mean go back to the time when the text was written, I meant go back to the beginning of civilizations and start over with some of the philosophies of the Tao Te Ching front and center in our minds.
And I don't think it praises the extermination of knowledge, but rather the extermination of the importance of knowledge of others. It stresses focusing on knowing yourself, striving for enlightenment rather than wisdom. That to me is very important, and would go a long way to alleviating some of the problems in our culture.
Ah, that makes more sense.
Where does the text encourage knowing oneself? The uncarved block should be thoughtless, shouldn't it?
"In governing the people, the sage empties their minds but fills their bellies... he always keeps them innocent of knowledge."
"Is it not because he is without thought of self that he is able to accomplish his private ends?"
"Are you capable of not knowing anything?"
"My mind is that of a fool—how blank."
"Exterminate learning and there will no longer be worries."
I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?
lists and reviews
Directly from the text:
There are other passages I have highlighted in the book I bought, but this was the one I found after a quick search. When the "novel" speaks of knowledge, it's separated from enlightenment.
To me, the text is all about enrichment of the spirit. It's about enlightenment, and there is no enlightenment without finding and knowing yourself. It stresses that material possessions can't and won't enrich your spirit, and knowledge of other people is irrelevant in life. It isn't fulfilling. It leads to jealousy, envy, and misery. I like this little blip I found while looking for passages:
Hm, I don't remember that line you quoted. Maybe our disagreement stems from differing translations. Where is that line in the book?
Anyway, given the underlying metaphysics of ineffability and nothingness, and the constant call to "embrace the void", be empty-minded, and so forth, it seems obvious to me that the enlightenment Lao Tzu presents is all about a passive, anti-intellectual mode of being. Self-knowledge would only come in as a quasi-Buddhist admission of one's own non-existence.
I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?
lists and reviews
Could be. I have the Barnes and Noble edition. I'm not at home, so I'll have to check later and let you know.
Tell that to the Buddhists and they'll decry you as a personalist. I don't think finding and knowing yourself is necessary for enlightenment.
I think the text goes a whole lot further than just denouncing knowledge of other people. But even that is enough for me to strongly disagree with Lao Tzu's philosophy. Like it or not, our existence is intersubjective, and to say that knowledge of others is irrelevant in life is to deny the structure of life itself. In that case, Taoism is only one step away from Buddhism's denunciation of existence all together.
I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?
lists and reviews
How can a person be in anyway considered enlightened if they do not know themselves? The meaning of enlightentment comes from Buddhism: the title of Buddha means the enlightened one, if my understanding of the religion is correct. It means that the Buddha achieved knowledge of his present and all past lives. This tradition is very much alive in contemporary society, this search to gain knowledge of past lives, and not all of it is Shirley Maclaine chicanery.
"Modern weapons can defend freedom, civilization, and life only by annihilating them. Security in military language means the ability to do away with the Earth."
-Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society
Buddhism holds that the self doesn't exist. A "person" is simply a sequence of karma formations, which persist solely as a habitual manifestation of desire. Enlightenment is reached upon ceasing to desire and realizing that there is no self, at which point the karma formations and the cycle of reincarnation cease. In some sense this is knowing oneself, so I guess it's just a semantics issue.
I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?
lists and reviews
i really love PASSION, but was turned down by ORANGE. is CHERRY worth reading? in fact should i give her another chance?
do you like her? the last time i did a top ten fav. author, she's number 10. now she's bumped off by robertson davies. i absolutely love certain stories in WINTER. haven't read DESTINY. and EHRENGARD is...what it's, i guess.
funny you manage to read two of her novels i haven't. what do you think of them? your opinion on the dame in general? she is my second favorite auther. (i'm actually now in the middle of cato and henry which is wonderful. if it turns into a mess in the end, i won't be too surprise though, knowing murdoch.)
"Over analysis is like the oil of the Match-Cut machine." KK2.0
Cherry's worth reading. But doesn't compare to The Passion.
Which stories did you like? I love The Dreaming Child & Peter and Rosa. The Diver was my fave from Anecdotes of Destiny. Ehrengard was meh.
What have you read by Robertson Davies?
I preferred The Time of the Angels to both The Unicorn and The Bell. I don't adore her. Have you read most of hers?!?!?
*cowers at impossible feat*
WINTER was about six years ago, but from my memory I like the first story, especially the blue jar which is a tale within that story. I like the one in which a mother has to do a hell of plowing to save her son. And I think I like Peter and Rosa. Is that the one in which
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high spirits which is his collection of ghost stories. LOVE it. Deptford trilogy, and i just started on Cornish. finished REBEL.
:P I only read half. in fact i haven't read ANGELS either, so this is like one eighth chance.
"Over analysis is like the oil of the Match-Cut machine." KK2.0
Yep. *sniffs*
When are you posting your full list?
*nags*
cut and paste from my blog
S. Freud's "The joke and its relation to the unconscious"
S. Zizek's "The Metastases of Enjoyment"
C. Mouffe's "The return of the political"
J. Derrida's "The politics of friendship"
C. Schmitt's "Political Theology" & "The Concept of the Political"
V. Woolf's "A Room of One's Own"
W. M. Miller Jr.'s "A Canticle for Leibowitz"
R. Davies's "The Rebel Angels"
J.M. Coetzee's "Foe"
M. Moorcock's "Behold the Man"
M. Puig's "Kiss of the Spider Woman and two other plays"
K. Johnson's "The Magician and the Cardsharp"
M. Foucault's "The History of Sexuality: an Introduction"
A. Bechdel's "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic"
C. Dicken's "The Tale of Two Cities"
P. Roth's "American Pastoral"
S. Plath's "The Bell Jar"
J. Fforde's "Lost in a Good Book"
J. J. Saer's "The Investigation"
S. Bellow's "The Adventures of Augie March"
I. Dinesen's "Ehrengard"
O. Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray"
W. Percy's "The Moviegoer"
K. Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day"
I. Murdoch's "A Severed Head"
A. Carter's "The Magic Toyshop"
J. K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow"
T. Williams's "27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Short Plays"
R. Carver's "Cathedral"
R. Davies's "High Spirits"
S. Bedbury's "A New Brand World"
I. Calvino's "Hermit in Paris"
J. Bowles's "Plain Pleasures"
H. Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird"
M. Amis's "The Information"
T. Capote's "In Cold Blood"
G. Greene's "The Power and the Glory"
M. Atwood's "Dancing Girls"
A. Koestler's "Darkness at Noon"
R. Carver's "What We Talk about When We Talk about love"
A. S. Byatt's "Angels & Insects"
B. Friedman's "The Moral Consequences of Economic"
G. Grass's "The Gunter Grass Reader"
N. Frye's "The Secular Scripture"
P. Coelho's "The Valkyries"
N. Mahfouz's "Thebes at War"
F. Dostoevsky's "Demons"
E. Hemingway's "The First Forty-Nine Stories"
G. Swift's "Last Orders"
C. Caudwell's "Illusion and Reality"
N. West's "The Day of the Locust"
S. Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"
T. Eagleton's "Literature Theory"
J. Sartre's "No Exit and Three Other Plays"
L. Althusser's "Lenin and Philosophy and Other Ess...
J. Piaget's "Structuralism"
J. Bowles's "Two Serious Ladies"
G. Lukacs's "The Historical Novel"
I. Murdoch's "The Sacred and Profane Love Machine"
M. Atwood's "Surfacing"
J. Baldwin's "Going to Meet the Man"
U. Eco's "Six Walks in the Fictional Woods"
M. Foucault's "Discipline & Punish"
N. Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival"
C. Bukowski's "South of No North"
S. Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling"
I. Calvino's "The Path To The Spiders' Nests"
W. Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury"
T. Williams's "Memoirs"
F. Nietzsche's "Beyond Good & Evil"
A. Bester's "Virtual Unreality"
H. Bergson's "Matter and Memory"
R. Davies's "World of Wonders"
T. Williams's "The Glass Menagerie"/"A Streetcar Name Desire"
G. Grass's "Crabwalk"
G. Deleuze's "Francis Bacon"
R. Graves's "I, Claudius"
E. Graff's "Stepping Left"
J. Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies"
A. Camus's "The Myth of Sisyphus"
I. Calvino's "Cosmicomics"
A. Carter's "Wise Children"
C. Milosz's "The Captive Mind"
"Over analysis is like the oil of the Match-Cut machine." KK2.0
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