If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Happy Friday Subscribers.
It’s that time of the week when I throw out a few book recommendations. At the bottom, I have a short list of books I’m currently reading.
You can check out the last few week’s recommended books here and here and here.
Let’s go!
1. ‘The Outsider’ by Colin Wilson
From Amazon: Born to a working class English household in 1931, Colin Wilson went from being the "bad boy" of the British literary scene to becoming a wide-ranging historian, novelist, critic, and philosopher. In addition to his classic study of rebellion, The Outsider, Wilson distinguished himself as one of the most prolific and grounded historians of occult and esoteric movements. A rebel until the end, Wilson later in life wrote stirring intellectual defenses of optimism, challenging the dark vogue of figures such as Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett.
From the Back Flap: "Wilson's invisible man, the Outsider, may be described as a blend of existentialist hero, religious man without God, and prophet or saint-in-embryo. His dilemma might be described as that of a man living under the conviction of sin who cannot accept traditional Christianity...Indeed, The Outsider is a logically untenable book unless it is read in the light of Author Wilson's conviction that modern man "needs a new religion." But granting that controversial premise, Wilson's development of the nature and problems of the Outsider is consistently fascinating...Facing death and chaos head-on, the Outsider is heaven-bent, one might say, on finding a transcending meaning and purpose for human existence."
A passage from the book:
"...the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. `He sees too deep and too much,' and what he sees is essentially chaos...he is the one man who knows he is sick in a civilization that doesn't know it is sick."
2. ‘The Trouble with Being Born’ by Emil Cioran
From Amazon: Through a series of aphorisms, the Romanian philosopher meditates on the nature of being alive.
In this volume, which reaffirms the uncompromising brilliance of his mind, Cioran strips the human condition down to its most basic components, birth and death, suggesting that disaster lies not in the prospect of death but in the fact of birth, “that laughable accident.” In the lucid, aphoristic style that characterizes his work, Cioran writes of time and death, God and religion, suicide and suffering, and the temptation to silence. Through sharp observation and patient contemplation, Cioran cuts to the heart of the human experience.
A passage from the book:
We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good—have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world. … And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.
3. ‘The Courage to Create’ by Rollo May
From Amazon: What if imagination and art are not, as many of us might think, the frosting on life but the fountainhead of human experience? What if our logic and science derive from art forms, rather than the other way around? In this trenchant volume, Rollo May helps all of us find those creative impulses that, once liberated, offer new possibilities for achievement.
A renowned therapist and inspiring guide, Dr. May draws on his experience to show how we can break out of old patterns in our lives. His insightful book offers us a way through our fears into a fully realized self.
A passage from the book:
“The creative process must be explored not as the product of sickness, but as representing the highest degree of emotional health, as the expression of the normal people in the act of actualizing themselves. Creativity must be seen in the work of the scientist as well as in that of the artist, in the thinker as well as in the aesthetician; and one must not rule out the extent to which it is present in captains of modern technology as well as in a mother’s normal relationship with her child. Creativity…is basically the process of making, of bringing into being.”
Currently Reading:
The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Myth As Metaphor and As Religion by Joseph Campbell
The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems by Fernando Pessoa
Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac
The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing by Joost Mereloo
Happy reading, folks. Hope you all have a great weekend. Cheers till next time.
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