Groan Redux

 If it seems like it's the end of March that is apparently a delusion, although it's clearly not warm enough to qualify as a fever dream.

Greed

 After brooding over the question for several weeks, this morning I went ahead and cancelled my Audible membership. On one level it was hard to do, because I have a long commute and books on tape and Great Courses help make the drive manageable. Essentially, I don't mind the drive as much if I feel that I'm learning something at the same time. I recently made the decision to stop ordering things from Amazon, although it has often made my life a lot easier because I could track down objects, especially books, which would have been difficult to acquire. However, simply because I can punch a button on my phone and have a book magically appear at my doorstep doesn't make the process an ethical one. And if I'm going to ween myself off of Amazon, it didn't make much sense of keep Audible. Bezos climbing into bed with the other oligarchs in their adulation of Trump made all of this an easier decision. There was a time when millionaires invested their money in building libraries, whereas now they alternate between creating vanity spaceships and overthrowing our democracy. I was asked for a reason why I was cancelling my Audible account, so I simply wrote: "Greed of Jeff Bezos."

2025 Readings 31

My good friend Kerry is a huge Ursula K. Le Guin fan and has suggested her books to me several times over the years. However, somehow I've never tackled them. I guess I'm not a big science fiction fan, although the science fiction I like I tend to like a lot. In the end I ended up reading Le Guin's The Dispossessed because Janet came across a Substack discussion of the novel, and she decided to set up a local book chat. She and I have been thinking a lot about community lately, even as we seriously plan to leave this one that we love. Her decision to set up the chat - and our decision to present as part of Vermont Public Philosophy Week - reflect our desire to be part of the community, but also to take part of something positive, as compared to just giving into the temptation to rail against the authoritarian takeover of America. As we say in Islam, small kindnesses are a foundational part of making a better world. Anyway, we've had some lovely conversations with our little community that showed up to read The Dispossessed, and we're already talking about selecting another book to keep the momentum going. In regards to the book, I liked it a lot, and ended up liking it more than the other members of the group.

2025 Readings 30

 It's bizarre to think that in my long life I had never managed to read all of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. To be fair, it's one of those works which gave us so many familiar passages that the average person would never even associated with the poem: "Water, water, everywhere,/Nor any drop to drink," or "A sadder and a wiser man/He rose the morrow morn," or "He prayeth best, who loveth best/All things both great and small," or "And till my ghastly tale is told,/This heart within my burns." Some classic works don't age well, but, especially in this horrible, heartless age, Coleridge's message continues to resonate.

2025 Readings 29

 I recently finished Paul Tillich's The Courage to Be. He was briefly discussed in Charles Mathewes's Great Courses lectures on Why Evil Exists. Tillich's The Courage to Be, which is his work designed for a popular audience - as compared to his three volume masterwork Systematic Theology - was still a challenging read. I listened to it on Audible, which made it harder to pause for a deeper reflection, obviously, but I did what I normally do in situation like that - I sometimes pull the car over and email myself a note about a certain chapter. Of course, trying to find a physical copy of The Courage to Be proved to more challenging that I figured, since the local library in Montpelier doesn't have one. However, I will track one down, because I would like to revisit this work in greater depth. Tillich discussed the role of anxiety in the development of the self, focusing on the Anxiety of Death (which he associated with the beginnings of Christianity), the Anxiety of Faith (which he associated with the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation), and the Anxiety of Meaninglessness (which he associates with the 20th century and beyond). Obviously, these are not purely chronological phenomena, and they can exist concurrently today. In response, he discussed the need to focus on the concept of Being, including coming to terms with Non-Being. This is the part of his argument that is going to require that I track down a physical copy of the book for a more sustained reflection and analysis. Tillich talked about reaching the God beyond God, that is, not the theistic God that is limited by our perceptions of essence and existence, and who turns us into a mere Object (in fact, Tillich proposes, I would say correctly, that placing God in a Subject/Object relationship with us is also insulting to God), and instead is existence. I found this notion really moving, even as I struggled to truly get my brain around it. Again, I need to track down a physical copy for serious study.

2025 Readings 28

 As part of this year's goal of not only recording what I'm reading, but also giving myself more time to read. That includes, tackling books that I wouldn't normally consider. With that in mind, I just blew through Tana French's The Searcher. It's funny, I don't think of myself as someone who reads mystery or detective novels, but I've also read all of Arthur Conan Doyles's Sherlock Holmes short stories and novels (several times) and all of Craig Johnson's Longmire series and almost everything that James Ellroy has ever written. So, obviously, apparently I do read detective novels. On a lark I picked up Tana French's The Searcher when I was roaming around the Northshire bookstore in Manchester. I didn't realize that she had already written a number of novels, and was a quite successful author. All of this goes to show how we pigeon hole ourselves. As it turns out I enjoined the book quite a bit and blew through it very quickly, and might go back and read a couple of her earlier works. I didn't love the novel, but I liked it quite a bit, so now I have to decide whether to buy the next one of her novels or get it out of the library in Montpelier. I tend to always buy, mainly because I'd rather do what I can to support authors (even the successful ones). However, I'm also starting to consider a future overseas, and any book I read will be one I need to sort out. Anyway, I liked The Searcher and I can envision revisiting some of French's other works. 

2025 Readings 27

 OK, so it definitely seems to be cheating if you're recording the books that you read in the year, and include the Qur'an during Ramadan. So, I guess I'll have to give you that one. However, it is one of the books that I've read in 2025. As I've proposed several time on this blog, my favorite part of Ramadan is the extra time that we can devote to rereading and studying the Qur'an. I would argue that we focus too much attention on fasting, which I suspect is simply because it's easier to quantify. If we're so tired and hungry that we can't focus during our Quranic study, then it seems to me that we've allowed fasting to become the sort of distraction that we warn ourselves against. What amazes me every year is how I keep discovering new things as I work my way through my tattered  copy of Syed Nasr's The Study Quran. There is something beautiful - and necessary - about a consistent deep dive into a complex text. One morning this year I was reading one of Nasr's points (in his voluminous commentary) about praying, and I thought of something that I had never thought of before - or at least thought of something in a different way. It occurred to me the almost parallel similarity between the macro-world of our eternal spiritual life and the micro-world of our daily prayers. In my mind, it looked something like this:

             Death - - - - - - - - - - - - - Life - - - - - - - - - - - - Death

             Prayer - - - - - - -Time Between Prayer - - - - - - Prayer

In a monotheistic tradition where you only live one life, you almost need the time before and after life to make it all make sense. In Hinduism you just keep coming back until you work off your karmic shortcoming, so in the end, even if it may take thousands of lifetimes, everything will balance out and things will be fair and just. However, with one lifetime it almost certainly can't be fair and just, unless you take the much longer view of the time both after but also before you are alive. Essentially, you are with God during those times, and the time in-between, even if God is closer than your jugular vein (as we are told in the Qur'an), you're still not with God. As I was thinking about it that early morning, it seemed to me that the micro equivalent would be our daily time with prayer, with the time we are praying separated by the time where we are forced to go out into the crass and materialistic and decidedly non-spiritual world, before once again coming back into contact with the beautiful. Now, I don't even know if this makes any sense, and I'm still working my way through it. However, it spoke to me of the beauty of Ramadan, and, more generally, the necessity of carving off time for a deep dive into texts, whether the text is the Qur'an or The Book of Disquiet or the Meditations or the Iliad or Bleak House; there's always more time find. However, my joy was short-lived when I read the email from school celebrating the partnership that we're signing with an AI firm. More and more, it's clear that I don't fit in with the college to which I've given a quarter-century of my life.