Books

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.

the act of being engrossed in reading can help build the habit of attentiveness and the cultivation of silence. Jacobs writes about how a child sitting next to an adult reading them a book watches vividly in an engrossed manner as ideas, imagination and value are extracted from stationary pieces of printed text, as an aura of silence is created, blocking out everything else in the world that may exist for as long as the book has words yet to be read.

According to the ideas of Bastiat, placing such duties upon the law is not only unreasonable but can be actively detrimental to the social fabric of the state. For the more domains that government is involved in, the larger its surface area to fail or fall short, resulting in people dissatisfied and angry.

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My rating: 5 of 5 starsAs I started the first chapter of this book, I let out a mental yawn.I had picked this book from my shortlist of books to…