A little bit of a rebirth

I have been very exhausted lately. I am working at my last few shifts of my crappy undergraduate part-time job, and quickly moving into my better, full time, graduate-ish job at Autoshare, a car sharing company here in Toronto.

As someone currently beginning to apply for a degree in the Faculty of Information Studies, I am slowly realizing that it is not one particular genre of book that I enjoy, but all genres together, and in fact the book itself. When first coming to Toronto, which has the second largest book collection after Harvard in North America, I got this classic feeling of Angst that I would not be able, even in a thousand lifetimes, to read all the books at Robarts Library. Robarts itself reminds me of “The Library of Babel“, its shape at least. Also, I got very happy this week reading Boing Boing about this Information Scientist, Eugene Garfield, compiled the most cited works of 1976-1983. This list affirms my believe that I cannot specialize in any one genre, as shown by the top ten:

  1. T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 1962

  2. J. Joyce, Ulysses. 1922

  3. N. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957

  4. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

  5. N. Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. 1965

  6. M. Foucault, The Order of Things. 1966

  7. J. Derrida, Of Grammatology

  8. R. Barthes, S/Z. 1970

  9. M. Heidegger, Being and Time. 1927

  10. E.R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. 1948

I love books themselves, information itself, regardless of the truth of falsehood of what is proposed. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a beautiful book, with a highly suspect thesis. Does it matter? What I want to defend and fight for is the propagation of ideas themselves, in order for us to be able to make comments and judgements for ourselves. Like Borges, I see books and library with touches of mysticism and religiousness, and for me this religiousness transcends East, West, analytic, literary, poetry, prose, fiction.

In the future, I would love for this list to include some non-Western books, but as it stands it makes me very excited, to an unhealthy degree. Why should we privilege Anglo-American philosophy over Continental, or even Philosophy over Literature–I’m sure some would argue there is no distinction. I would add, why privilege academic works over religious ones, modern over ancient, etc etc. I like that I’ve read quite a few of them myself.

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