Thought(less)

 

“What is most thought-provoking in these thought-provoking times, is that we are still not thinking.”

 – Martin Heidegger

 

Oh how I pine for the misspent days of my youth, pre-Internet, where anything worthy of interest had to be diligently sought out, read, pondered, and re-read, soul stirring stuff rarely transmitted in 280 pages, let alone 280 characters.

Quick example? I fondly think back on the hours and hours spent wandering the book shelves in the Rutgers library on College Avenue, five floors worth of rickety metal shelving holding dusty dusky books dozens and decades years old. The frayed cloth jackets of those esoteric relics from prior ages, cradled reverently in my hands, fingerprinted with ghosts of students past. My initial forays into religious and philosophic ideas, unguided (and, hence, usually unfruitful), a drunken ramble through pre-modern thought (and modern does not necessarily mean “better”). One key phrase or paragraph or reference would lead me to another book, and another, and another.

The good old days.

When I learned to think.