ZenHalfTimeCrock
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Have read nine books since the start of the year. The two standouts so far are The Black Banners by Ali Soufan (about his time as an FBI agent prior to 9/11) and Collision With The Infinite by Suzanne Segal.
The latter is an obscure but compelling autobiography of someone who had a sudden and spontaneous experience when boarding a bus in Paris “'which left the body, mind and emotions empty of a person.”
By 'person' here is meant the Cartesian cogito, the sense of there being an internal and stable thinker behind our thoughts.
The change was permanent and left Segal struggling to make sense of it for the best part of a decade. Along the way she saw a succession of psychiatrists and psychotherapists, and had to face up to the possibility that her condition was pathological, perhaps an amplified version of depersonalisation disorder or something similar.
Eventually, though, she came to regard her transformation as essentially mystical in character.
But then she died of a brain tumour.
Further details here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_Segal
It’s obviously a very odd piece of writing, and yet the author never comes across as having mental health issues.
And there are precedents for her experience that can be found elsewhere. For example, Buddhists also tend to deny that we are anything more than an ever changing bundle of psycho-physical states. And the philosopher David Hume once wrote the following:
'For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.'
I guess a problem I have with all this is that an ontologically prior self is surely required to take note of the absence of one. But anyway, the book was fascinating all the same.
Have now moved on to Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths. Am a bit intimidated by his writing as he seems to have read everything and everybody, and his short stories (he never wrote any novels) are replete with frequently abstruse scholarly references and name-dropping. But none of this is done for effect. Instead, he is messing with your head in a good way by exposing you to fantastical paradoxes and extraordinary flights of the imagination. I just hope that I can keep up with him as I get further into the book.
The latter is an obscure but compelling autobiography of someone who had a sudden and spontaneous experience when boarding a bus in Paris “'which left the body, mind and emotions empty of a person.”
By 'person' here is meant the Cartesian cogito, the sense of there being an internal and stable thinker behind our thoughts.
The change was permanent and left Segal struggling to make sense of it for the best part of a decade. Along the way she saw a succession of psychiatrists and psychotherapists, and had to face up to the possibility that her condition was pathological, perhaps an amplified version of depersonalisation disorder or something similar.
Eventually, though, she came to regard her transformation as essentially mystical in character.
But then she died of a brain tumour.
Further details here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_Segal
It’s obviously a very odd piece of writing, and yet the author never comes across as having mental health issues.
And there are precedents for her experience that can be found elsewhere. For example, Buddhists also tend to deny that we are anything more than an ever changing bundle of psycho-physical states. And the philosopher David Hume once wrote the following:
'For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.'
I guess a problem I have with all this is that an ontologically prior self is surely required to take note of the absence of one. But anyway, the book was fascinating all the same.
Have now moved on to Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths. Am a bit intimidated by his writing as he seems to have read everything and everybody, and his short stories (he never wrote any novels) are replete with frequently abstruse scholarly references and name-dropping. But none of this is done for effect. Instead, he is messing with your head in a good way by exposing you to fantastical paradoxes and extraordinary flights of the imagination. I just hope that I can keep up with him as I get further into the book.
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