Books and Benchmarks
There are things we have learned along the way from books. Some books are benchmarks in our search for the amassing of survival techniques. How often have you heard people say that such and such book changed their life? Have they ever really told you in what way?
There have been books that have drastically revised my way of thinking about the world and my way of thinking about problem solving. Although I often refer to some of these books, I have not sat with the idea of in what way these books are important to me. I believe that I would better understand why some particular book seems important enough to me to keep mentioning it to people if I were to spend a little time telling myself exactly what the book meant to me. And then I would better understand who I am.
There are probably as many ways to think about books that have been important to you as there are people to think about that. More, in fact, because every time a person pulls out the odds and ends that makes up their memory trove, the contents look different.
The way I am thinking about books I have learned from, this morning, is to make a quick list of them.
Alfred Kroeber’s Anthropology
RD Lang’s Politics of Experience
The Power of Now by someone another Tull
George Kelly’s Toward a Theory of Personality Development
Oversoul Seven
Listening With the Third Ear
I think the next step in choosing a book to write about is to think why that book is important. My way of doing that is to just pick the one that jumps off the page at me. Before I start talking about RD Lang’s Politics of Experience. The first thought that comes to me is that for me, the Bible is not among the books of importance to me—at least not today. This could be not true, because, one of the things that I have learned, one that has not come from a book is that the some of most important things that I have learned along the way is that something I believed that I knew to be true is not true—perhaps almost everything.
Perhaps I should have selected Kroeber’s Anthropology as the first book that made a strong impact on me. After all, Kroeber was the first writer whose style of writing and thinking I particularly noticed. He used language with deliberate precision and presented his ideas with a striking quality of clarity that I had not encountered before reading his work. Perhaps Kroeber’s work should have changed my life. Unfortunately, although I found his style of thinking impressive, I also regarded that style of thinking as something beyond my wildest dreams.
Today when I collected the list of books that have been important to me, R.D. Lang’s The Politics of Experience heads the list. It may well the most important book I have ever encountered. Which is odd, since I have read it only one time, while I have read Gary Zukov’s Seat of the Soul repeatedly. The fact is that I am not even clear in my mind what the hypothesis Lang based his book on was. But, it remains a land mark book in my search for poetic knowledge.
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