The Never-Ending Quest

I have a sadistic bone in my brain. Or masochistic. Or something like supreme conceit crossed with raging inner-directed anger.

What do you mean, you may be asking.

Well, it never fails, but whenever I find myself in a library or bookstore (which somehow happens to occur 2 to 3 times a week), my first autopilot thought is – what’s the most complex, abstruse, mind-boggling book in the joint? That’s the book I need to read.

Why do you think I subjected myself to Hegel? Kant? Ouspensky? Why do you think I decided to read Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain? Tolstoy’s War and Peace? Why do I gleefully slobber when I find my college Calc III text in some obscure dust-laden corner of a rarely-visited biblioteca?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m more fool than genius. Take Hegel, for instance. I started the Hopper while I was delving through a thick omnibus of his writings: Philosophy of History, History of Philosophy, Philosophy of the Philosophy of History, Philosophy of the History of Philsophy, blah blah blah. The first hundred pages I made a good effort. Then, the glazing-over effect set in: my eyes read the words, my brain interpreted the words, but there was a massive disconnect – followed by an eventual and willful disdain of the material – that overrode my cognitive processes. All done, I probably understood less than 5 percent of what Hegel was writing. I don’t even remember what that 5 percent was. Don’t even remember if I finished the book or not.

Kant – never made it past the first 20 pages of the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason. Mann’s book I ceased reading halfway through. Tolstoy not even that far. My excursions into higher math – i.e., the Calc III textbook I found – I struggled through 20 years ago and keep telling myself I’ll eventually finish it … in my fifties in an effort to thwart Alzheimer’s.

So this morning the wife tells me to stop off at the local library with the little ones to pick up some books for them for our weekend trip. Guess what thought immediately ran through my head?

I’ll let you know what I picked up later …