I try to keep in mind that there are lots of people who think that reading is a waste of time and that people who do it are pathetic. I've encountered that attitude more than a few times in my life...even, as I've previously noted, from a group of fellow English teachers. And I understand it to some extent. If you're reading, then you're not doing anything in the world, and we're taught to think that doing things in the world is what matters.
And I'd have to agree that there is a point at which reading can become a way of not living. If you wake up in the morning, reach for a book, and read until you fall asleep that night (in this scenario, you have a combination toilet / bed and robot servants who bring you food and drink, I suppose), that seems a bit much. Although as soon as those words were out of my fingers, I thought: What if the guy in the toilet bed is trying to find a cure for cancer, and is studying all the relevant literature...and what if he does that for ten years (or twenty years, or whatever) and then jumps out of bed (probably with the help of a robot servant, unless there's been some electrical stimulation of those idle muscles) and screams, "Eureka!" and goes to his lab, mixes some manganese, selenium, St. John's Wort, and Ovaltine into an 8 ounce cup of milk, and hands the glass full of this concoction to his cancer ridden assistant, who downs it, swoons for a moment, and then feels the cancer cells leaping out of his body...and falling to the floor, looking like dead maggots. Well, that wouldn't have been a waste of time, would it? In fact, everyone would applaud that guy (or gal) as one of the greatest heroes in the history of mankind. And there's the rub of it. No matter how much time you spend doing (essentially / apparently) n0thing, if you do something at the end of all that, it justifies The Nothing. It's kind of like that Good Thief on the cross with Jesus. He was (apparently) a nasty bastard for 99.99999% of his life, but at the very end, during his last few minutes, he said something nice to Jesus--he didn't actually even do anything, just said, "Hey, Bad Thief, quit fucking with Jesus!"--and he got to go to Heaven that same day. (Didn't even have to wait for Judgment Day...which is a little bit of inconsistency which still bothers me.) We tend to judge by the outcome rather than the process. Look at poor William Blake. He was a big loser during his lifetime, but after he died lots of people decided he was a genius. So now he's (rightly) revered. Same with Van Gogh. And, to some extent, Philip K. Dick, who spent much of his adult life in abject poverty...before the movies discovered him and made his works into properties worth hundreds of millions of dollars. (For the PKD impaired, check this out: Screamers, Paycheck, The Adjustment Bureau, Minority Report, Total Recall, Total Recall, Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly...not to mention the Amazon series Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams.)
ANYway. Today I started on Volume 11 of A History of Philosophy by Fr. Frederick Copleston. It's the last volume...and the shortest, weighing in at a mere 230 pages. I will at least stick to my ten pages per day commitment, and since I comfortably kept up with 15 pages per day (or more) on the previous volume, I may even go with that. Which means that I am 15.3 to 23 days away from finishing this big (5,344 pages according to Wikipedia) project up. Copleston spent 30 years (maybe more, since I am dating that statement from the publication of the first volume to the publication of the final volume, and he might have / probably did spend more time writing the first volume than the last) writing these books. (And what about that? Was that a waste of time? I'm sure that some people would say so. I've been directly asked once--and indirectly asked another time 1 --why I am reading it, which would definitely imply that the writing of it falls into the Questionable Use Of Your Time On Earth category for some folks. But I'm pretty excited about it, to tell the truth.)
And after just a few pages I found myself wondering: What the fuck is logical positivism? So I Googled. And I didn't really feel like reading a lot of folderol, so I looked for a video. And I found "I Hope This Helps: Logical Positivism" with Sam Dresser, which I thought was both helpful and entertaining. It included a bit of explanation which ended with what will have to be my next Favorite Context Free Quote of the Week: "Jim is obviously an asshole is a meaningless sentence." I liked Sam Dresser enough to look around at his internetable stuff, and found out that he is a very interesting guy as well. Check out Aeon and Intellectual Takeout if you have the time and an interest in things philosophical. Speaking of which, he makes a passing reference to reading A History of Philosophy...makes no big deal about it at all, and I got the impression that this was something he did at a very young age, so he's up several notches on this one on me...and he made a comment about how it was kind of irritating that Copleston doesn't translate quotations from foreign sources. I am with you, Sam. That Copleston fucker seems to think that everybody either knows Latin and Greek or has easy access to translations. You ever try to Google Greek? Well I have....
So to make a short story even longer, I found out that logical positivism basically just means that if you can't verify it, it ain't true. So definitely not the philosophy for me, but I'm still hot to read this here volume 11. Which is what I shall do right now. Unless I decide to go out to a bar and drink four beers and maybe convince some girl I don't know to come home and have sex with me. Have to admit that that would be a lot more meaningful...but I don't know if I have the energy. I'm no spring chicken, after all.
1 My friendgirl Pat likes to tell her other friends about my activities, and when she told one of them that I was reading A History of Philosophy the friend replied, "Why would he want to do that?" Pat's response was, "It gives us interesting things to talk about when we mall walk." Ha ha. You've got to pass the time somehow, after all. Talking philosophy, talking soap operas, playing word tennis...something.
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