Thursday, October 23
Right, no more mining old piles of paper for semi-readable text. It would be a bad habit to get into.
Reading old notebooks can be fascinating. It is an exercise in rediscovering what I failed to express adequately a year or five ago. Not one thought in a dozen lodged in my head, let alone developed into something real.
My intellectual history is like the Platte River: Wide, shallow, and full of sandbars. Here, one notebook's worth: William James and Varieties of Religious Experience, The Gospel of Thomas, Vannevar Bush, poetry, tobacco smoke, mixtapes, Latin predicates, Simon the Magician, arbitrary tag parsing in pseudo-HTML, Scotch, monasticism, synthesis of knowledge and people who have it all too together, Low, the Dao, Iraq, and the untenability of a political indifference I still haven't renounced in a meaningful fashion.
If I knew much about any of these things, they might add up, but they are little more than references. Little stubs of unexplored knowledge. I'm not turning them into links here for a reason. At the moment, I suspect that we have been learning to use the hyperlink as a clever substitute for internalizing knowledge. Somebody somewhere knows about it, and if I point at them, surely it's as good as telling you myself, isn't it?