MY CHAIN MAIL OF HAPPINESS-2

Inquisitive book readers are going through tough times. If we are interested in the news, we read newspapers and watch the news on television. It is spellbinding, but truly I have come to the conclusion that it can be very disturbing. Everything seems to be wrong with the world. The climate crisis, the energy crisis, Afghanistan, the bullying of China, the locking up of Navalny in Russia, the demise of a free press in most countries of the world and as a corollary the inability to listen to criticism by our world leaders.

Should an ordinary citizen be bothered by these massive issues? Could we not just roll up and read the History of Philosophy by Will Durant or Robinson Crusoe or Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations.”

“Do things external which happen to you distract you?” Marcus Aurelius asked, before offering his advice to “cease to be whirled around.”=Trump’s defense pick Mattis’ favorite philosopher Marcus Aurelius has wisdom for president-elect 

Alas, just reading books is for the professors and if you want to do that you have to get yourself educated to a high level. There is no getting away from it. If you want to climb the social ladder you have to study and graduate and Post Graduate and get a job and then learn more skills till you are a master in your field. Perhaps then you can curl up at home on a weekend and read a book.

It comes to that old joke but why do I need to work to find time to idle, I am idling anyway right now.

Books are friends when we cannot meet our friends as was shown in these Covid-19 times. Learn to love books and you will never be lonely.

I bought Meditations by Marcus Aurelius because I read somewhere General Mattis carried one in his bag when he was commanding in Iraq.–

Some books are like Ulysses by James Joyce and The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, they need keys or reference books to understand them.

“This episode (Nestor) is the source of some of the novel’s most famous lines, such as Dedalus’s claim that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” and that God is “a shout in the street”.”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel) 

As if to corroborate my thoughts on my chain mail of letters The Name of the Rose– “The quote in the novel, “books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told”, refers to a postmodern idea that all texts perpetually refer to other texts, rather than external reality, while also harkening back to the medieval notion that citation and quotation of books was inherently necessary to write new stories.”-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Key_to_Rebecca

TO BE CONTINUED