The Problem with Reading

I marvel at people who can remember everything they have read...the titles, the authors, the arguments, maybe even a turn of phrase.  I can't help but think they haven't read very much.  Either that, or they are amongst the precious few with a photographic memory, who have refrained from damaging their precious brain cells with alcohol, drugs, and late nights.   But then,  I can't help but think they haven't lived very much.

Of course, I'm only trying to justify my own choices in life...and my own lack of recollection of the specifics.  It all begins to blur together.  People, places, events, but especially the ideas...the arguments and debates.  You know that specific feeling of deja vu you get when someone tells you a story they've told you before?  And maybe they told it to you when you were drunk, or they were drunk, or high, or after a long bout of exercise or a big meal.  And when they tell it to you, you're pretty sure you've heard it before, but not until they hit a certain part, or until they use a particular phrase, or perhaps not at all.  You just get this feeling of familiarity, as if you already know what's going to happen and you already understand the situation being imparted to you, but you're not quite quite sure.  My whole life is like that.

It's my mother's fault really.  I grew up in a house full of books; crammed with books; stuffed to the gills with books.  We moved several times when I was growing up, and we always had to move the books...boxes upon boxes upon banker's boxes of books.  Consequently, I grew up reading voraciously.  I read all our children's books...the usual Dr. Seuss and Katy Kangaroo and Little Fur Family and the one about the caterpillar, then all the Eyewitness books and history books and retellings...Illustrated Classics?  O, and Nancy Drew of course.  All of Nancy Drew, and the horse books and the babysitter books.  And then I read all the young adult fiction...Phantom Tollbooth, Lloyd Alexander, Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, the Giver, and those ones about the boys surviving in the woods with the animals.  O, and Redwall...all the Brian Jacques.

I read the ones with dragons and the ones with knights, and the ones in space.  I got into fantasy and science fiction, and classic fiction too.  Bronte, Austen, Dumas, Shakespeare.  Anthologies of Eastern fiction, translated.  Mythology was big for a while - Greek/Roman, Norse, Native American of various tribes, Indian, Chinese.  Poetry.  I loved the Romantics.  Who doesn't?  The Romantics are to poetry as cabernet sauvignon or merlot is to red wine.  I read over 1000 romance novels.

Then, classic histories.  Herodotus, Thucydides, and Homer.  I learned Greek and Latin.  Catullus.  We moved on to Logic and Philosophy.  I must've read The Republic three times before college.  As a teenager, I loved Machiavelli, idolized his expediency.  The angst of Russian literature appealed as well.  Brothers Karamazov and War & Peace and Chekhov.  Political science as well. Hobbes and Locke and Kant.  Later, when I went to college, I read many of them again.  And I read Nietzsche then and Foucault and Arendt and Marx and Hegel and Heidegger...the literature of the Balkans, and short stories.  I studied Russian and international relations, so I got a further dose of Russian literature and a good deal of political theory.  Chomsky.  Gender studies was in there somewhere...feminist literature and queer literature.  Buddhism.

In college, I started really reading the news.  Sometimes obsessively.  Russian combined with international studies had made me extremely wary of propaganda, and I could not rely on any single source of news, so I tried to read them all.  That was before there were quite so many 'quality' online news sources.  After college, I had a couple of shit jobs and I was reading more and more online, and I started browsing Reddit and Hacker News. 

Suffice to say that I have read enough, and in so many genres, and at so many different times, that the ideas and the connections all blend together.  I have a devil of a time identifying my sources, or parsing out the map of connections that has led to one opinion or another.  I also have a hard time forming steadfast opinions.  You read enough opposing opinion and encounter so many deep opposing philosophies and study the world views that have led up to such histories, and you realize that there is no objective Truth and little historical fact.  There is just perspective, and a moral compass developed by the society you live in and grew up in.  The winners rewrite history, and true cultural differences are guarded by the language barrier.  All our news is tinged with propaganda and opinion, and half of it is fiction.  Go deep enough into the study of any great author, and the white tower specialists will show you how debated is the translation of a word, and how the life of the author shows different or subtler meaning in their work than conventionally understood.

In all of this, where can this humble blog go?  What can I say really?  The truth - lower case 't' - is somewhere hovering above or below the morass of articles and books and opinion pieces - in between, unspoken - and it will always be seen and interpreted differently by each reader.  When you see too much room for interpretation, it becomes extremely difficult to expose one's self by embracing a single one, or by relying on even a bunch of sources.  Not because I am cowardly, but because I don't know well enough to say.  Because my understanding is intuited from all of it, all the books and articles and short stories and poetry and news and opinion pieces, and life too. If a computer, after digesting thousands and thousands of poems, presented you with a haiku, would you ask it for its inspiration?  Maybe we aren't so different after all, human and machine.  Or maybe I've been reading too much science fiction again.