“One day, when in the opinion of the world one has long been educated, one discovers oneself: that is where the task of the thinker begins; now the time has come to invoke his aid—not as an educator but as one who has educated himself and thus has experience.” –Friedrich Nietzsche Like many of those suffering through the dry, endless, prosaic hours of the classroom, I struggled during the years of my education to pay attention to what the teacher had demanded, cajoling schoolchildren that had long since divided themselves into the tiers of institutional excellence: the obsequious and the fawning, the girly brown-noses, the front-rowers, the A-students; the middle…
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The number of books in the world is staggering, absorbing countless reams of paper bearing tiny black marks like a gargantuan wading ice floe covered with gnats. One could say that every year—an arbitrary but serviceable interval of time—most of this congeries of bound paper (totaling almost 130 million books as of 2010) is shuffled toward what littérateur and Everyman alike designate as oblivion. The vast majority of books are, of necessity, hurtling meteorites striking the earth of a readership somewhere in the desert, where none will discover them; a minority of these books that have struck the earth are rarities containing jewels, wonderful discoveries for those who are intellectuals…
