Sartor Resartus, by Thomas Carlyle, if you can’t read the words on the book cover.
Only a few words. I must admit that I only read about forty or forty-five pages of the book. It was a good read, too, but I have a bit too much on my plate at the moment. It’s slated for a re-read to completion at some indefinite point in the future, like, say, when I actually have a monetary income and children who are a bit older and self-sufficient.
It’s the second thing of Carlyle’s that I’ve read, and I find the man’s writing interesting in a way that early-nineteenth century writers are not usually thought. I love his choice of words. I love his jolly veiled sarcasm. I love the hyper-important tone taken by the narrator. I love the winding and unpredictable paths his wonderings take. However, at a quarter of the way into the work, I kinda knew where the book was going, though – who knows, not I! – I might have been surprised down the home stretch. Since my free-reading time has now dwindled to maybe thirty minutes a day, if that, there are other works that I think would be of better value for me to spend it on.
Sartor Resartus tells the story and thought of a highly-regarded German philosopher whose work is about to be published for the first time in Britain. More precisely, it tells it from the point of view of the man who is to spearhead the effort. A man who is fawning, sycophantic, enamored entirely with his subject and his subject’s convoluted philosophy. Though I may be mistaken, I saw a parody of Hegel, complete with its sweeping if somewhat nonsensical historicity, its self-importance and wonder at the prospect of discovering, or inventing at least, something new, its propensity for Capitalized Nouns, its seeing the cosmos in every minor detail.
How I wish I read the book a year and a half ago – I might have saved myself twenty or thirty hours of head-pounding torturous reading. But I’m painfully curious to a fault, and the temptation to decipher Hegel is still there, always, just biding its time, treading water in a darkened sea. May I read this book in full before I turn back to the Philosophy of History, or the History of Philosophy!
Only a few words. I must admit that I only read about forty or forty-five pages of the book. It was a good read, too, but I have a bit too much on my plate at the moment. It’s slated for a re-read to completion at some indefinite point in the future, like, say, when I actually have a monetary income and children who are a bit older and self-sufficient.
It’s the second thing of Carlyle’s that I’ve read, and I find the man’s writing interesting in a way that early-nineteenth century writers are not usually thought. I love his choice of words. I love his jolly veiled sarcasm. I love the hyper-important tone taken by the narrator. I love the winding and unpredictable paths his wonderings take. However, at a quarter of the way into the work, I kinda knew where the book was going, though – who knows, not I! – I might have been surprised down the home stretch. Since my free-reading time has now dwindled to maybe thirty minutes a day, if that, there are other works that I think would be of better value for me to spend it on.
Sartor Resartus tells the story and thought of a highly-regarded German philosopher whose work is about to be published for the first time in Britain. More precisely, it tells it from the point of view of the man who is to spearhead the effort. A man who is fawning, sycophantic, enamored entirely with his subject and his subject’s convoluted philosophy. Though I may be mistaken, I saw a parody of Hegel, complete with its sweeping if somewhat nonsensical historicity, its self-importance and wonder at the prospect of discovering, or inventing at least, something new, its propensity for Capitalized Nouns, its seeing the cosmos in every minor detail.
How I wish I read the book a year and a half ago – I might have saved myself twenty or thirty hours of head-pounding torturous reading. But I’m painfully curious to a fault, and the temptation to decipher Hegel is still there, always, just biding its time, treading water in a darkened sea. May I read this book in full before I turn back to the Philosophy of History, or the History of Philosophy!
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