Watching Joe Biden turn into a mumbling moron with stuffed artichokes for brains has reminded me that for us older folks it’s use it or lose it. So, I’ve initiated a cultural renaissance right here in Dunwich. I’ve got three very different reading projects going on. They are:
- Northmen: The Viking Saga, AD 793-1241, by John Haywood
- The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin, by Søren Kierkegaard
- The Bounty Trilogy: The Complete Series: Mutiny on the Bounty, Men Against the Sea & Pitcairn’s Island, by James Norman Hall (Author), Charles Nordhoff (Author)
The Kierkegaard book on “Anxiety” is the most questionable project. I took some courses in philosophy as an undergraduate and found them to be highly annoying. They seem to spend so much time and effort splitting hairs that by the end, all of the audience has walked away in boredom. And they employ so much specialized jargon that the notes for the vocabulary sometimes outweighs the text itself. But I want to give this guy the benefit of the doubt. He claims he wants to make philosophy more about what we need to do as human beings and less about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I figure the least I can do is slog through the argument.
The Bounty trilogy is just a book I’ve always meant to read and now have finally gotten around to. And so far, it’s a good one. I’m finding that the 1930’s Charles Laughton movie is pretty close to the text. It’s an exciting adventure story that has the added advantage of having actually happened. It is a fictionalized account but it is based on the documents left by the protagonists and by their descendants. Other than the myriad of parts of a sailing ship that I don’t know the names of the book is a fast read. I’ll have a review of this when I finish.
The Northmen book is something I’ve been interested in learning more about for a while. I was writing a sci-fi/ fantasy story that used Valhalla as a plot element and I just kept running into aspects of Norse mythology and history that I wasn’t up on. This book looked to be a way to fill in some gaps and also provide me with some information I’ve always been interested in. The Scandinavians had a very large impact on several different aspects of European and by extension world history. I feel like I should know a lot more about their origins before I start introducing them and their culture into my stories. I’ve just gotten started with the book but already I’ve learned a bit about the origins of the Goths, Burgundians and Vandals that I didn’t already know.
As I said yesterday, our whole lives shouldn’t be railing against the progs. As the ZMan says, a negative identity does not provide a basis for a viable society. We must pursue the actions and goals that have intrinsic value. If we are claiming that the Left is trying to destroy our way of life by denying us the opportunity to do things that we value then shouldn’t we be doing everything we can to do these things? Otherwise, it’s all just cant and posturing.
So, stretch your mind and learn something new. Then figure a way to make some of it relevant to your life.