Wow. It's been two months now since I updated this list. I'm behind a little. Let's see. This book was an easy read - sort of. It's about this woman who was, well, a little wierd.
She might be crazy. Well, she was certainly crazy. But she may have been only partly crazy. She thought she was the last person on earth. The entire book is a list of reflections she made to herself.
The afterward of the book was written by Stephen Moore and contains a quote by Wittgenstein with which I was unfamiliar (actually I was utterly unfamiliar with Wittgenstein before having read that afterward), but now I am familiar with this single quote of Wittgenstein which sort of put this entire book into context for me. When I said I was utterly unfamiliar with Wittgenstein a moment ago, of course I mean to to say that I am still unfamiliar with him, never having met him, but that I was (and am) quite unfamiliar with any of his works. Except this quote. Oh, and the quote in the opening jacket "I can well understand why children love sand." Now that's an interesting quote, but it's not the one that set the book in context for me. That one was "Philosophy is the battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by language." Now there's a quote.
Well, I thought it was a fine quote. This book in which I read it was quite a strange book, though. It was just a bunch of ramblings from a woman - a very literate woman - who thinks she is alone on the earth. And maybe she is and maybe she isn't. In any case, she's is alone on this earth spiritually, regardless of whether she is alone on this earth physically. Maybe we are all alone spiritually, and she is just expressing what we all feel, or what all creative people feel, or all intelligent people feel, or what all literate people feel. I don't know. Maybe she's expressing the inexpressible - or attempting to do it.
Of course when I said 'spiritually' in the above passage I did not necessarily mean 'having to do with spirits or the spiritworld.' I meant spirit as in 'that thing that we recognize in humans that makes us human, some aspect of our material mind, an artifact of our brain."
A strange character. A stranger book. Lots of interesting tidbits of of information in it. Facts about Maupassant and Rembrandt and Wittgenstein. Just factoids, I reckon. And yet.
Well, they kinda tie together. Loosely anyways. Think I'll go write a message somewhere "Somebody's living in Cyberspace." Just in case.
