Reading a good book often is like sticking your hand into a ‘grab bag’. You find text in the book that you can savour, little diamonds of truth. For some reason phrases sometimes act like keys, they open up a chamber of thought that you forgot about.
A rich source was the White tiger from Aravind Adiga that I wrote about a few days ago. Check out this part of a phrase (page 11 in the paperback edetion (Atlantic books London):
(…) all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.
I don’t think I ever read a more adequate description of how human gather knowledge and form ideas about the world. I particulary like the evolutionary aspect about it (the ideas in our head bugger each other and create new species). But the most striking blow in the head of any rationalist approach to societal affairs is the concluding: ‘this is what you act on and live with’.
I am in favour of mixing the Nobel prize for fiction with sociology.
Tags: art & literature, citation, ideas, opinions, rationalism