Books

since speech is not required, objects are no longer bound within the limits of their literal names, you can freely experience objects as they are in reality without any intermediary. I found this to be quite insightful and made me think about the connection we all experience with the world and how often we can feel things more intimately without any words being said. Think about relationships with loved ones or even pets, words are quite often entirely unnecessary, so why should this not extend to ‘things’ too?

Overall, ‘The Fate of Empires’ is a sobering read, aside from the small points of dispute mentioned, it is hard to fault Glubb’s rationale. We can see many of the aspects he speaks of in our world today, but the overall idea of each civilisation having a lifestyle (as Ibn Khaldun also mentioned centuries ago) is one worth internalising. We can be biased in thinking that things will never change, and for a lot of people’s lifetimes they haven’t. But just like nature has its seasons, so do men and the nations they build. It would be prudent for us to always be aware that the only thing constant in life is change, and ‘The Fate of Empires’ is a fantastic way to introduce oneself to the idea.

Considering that this book was written in the 17th century, I noted how all the ideas within are timeless. I recognised so many popular contemporary ideas in this writing and I am sure even older writings and teaching exist predating this. How true it is that everything has truly been said, experienced and taught before!

I understand that the nature of a ‘last stand’ in of itself is that the soldiers and warriors who take part usually end up ‘dead to the last man’ and therefore no first hand accounts from their perspective survives, so I can extend some leniency in this regard; however this was a constant theme throughout the book. I learnt more about the context of the civilisation at the time rather than the event of the ‘last stand’ itself. Even including some last stands which left survivors or first-hand witnesses would have added some much needed flavour to this book. Without them however, this left a dissatisfied, sour taste in my mouth, feeling somewhat cheated out of my expectations.

Can I give it the excuse of being too esoteric for me? Yes. Can I give it the excuse of an inadequate translation from the original? Perhaps. But none of these detract from the fact that this was an extremely difficult read. I had to make extra effort to inject structure, meaning and flow into the text and it might even be that my interpretations are a result of my own extrapolations rather than what Mishima intended.

Though the time may have passed for anyone born after him, Arabian Sands provides a fascinating insight into the life of the Arab Bedouins. It is a life that most of us will never experience, but one that we can glimpse through the window that Thesiger has opened for us.

I still have a long way to go before I see myself as having implemented all the advices therein, but the train has left the station and the seeds have been planted. The roots of behaviour change have begun to entrench themselves into the earth.

Who hasn’t seen their child do such a thing? And yet who would have the genius to see it in this way? My own young son has been doing this for a long time now and this fundamentally changed the way I saw it. Being newly born into the world with no understanding of how anything works is a daunting prospect we adults can hardly understand, let alone a child, and yet to separate the ’outer’ from the ’inner’, to give the ‘inner’ some value and distinctive identity serves as a signal for the child to say “I am here, I exist! I am me!”. This was but one example of how something so simple became cause for deep thought.

Another interesting idea is that some books can express a positive harm over its reader. Typically we do not think of books in this way, either they provide benefit or they are seen as inapplicable or useless, and the reader is typically able to discard it in the case of the latter. But in some cases a book may contain ideas that are positively harmful to a man while he enthusiastically absorbs them. Perhaps the ideas contain instructions not applicable to his stage in life or maybe they are simply not suited to his temperament despite their overall truthfulness.

While wisdom in itself can be difficult to comprehensively define, such a simple explanation of it by Durant encompassed a core tenet of it. It is to see events with wide eyes that cast vision upon the horizon, it is to realise that events do not happen in one’s life in isolation. That everything is a connected to everything else and that there are patterns which we can spot and observe which point towards the greater purpose behind them.