Transcripts
1. Back To The Basics : Is rolling. Hello and welcome to this new course titled
back to the basics, where we get to address
the very basics of how to bring more literature and
philosophy into your life. The idea for this course cross my mind about a
year ago when I was reading this book by Bertrand Russell titled
The Conquest of happiness. And for one of the
earlier chapters, Bertrand Russell
outlined a very, very, very sad truths about
today's society. The knowledge of
good literature, which was universal among educated people 50
or 100 years ago, now confined to a
few professors. Now personally that idea of confining good literature
and philosophy behind the closed doors of academia doesn't really
sit right with me. In the first course
of this series, we're going to tackle the very foundational basics
of how to bring more philosophy and literature into your otherwise busy life. And the question
that we all have to ask ourselves is this, in a hyper distracted world when information is so abundant, how do we be more
deliberate with our information intake and to sprout time to allow an engagement with
philosophy and literature. My name is RC Walden, and over the past six
years I've been documenting my own journey of trying to do that very thing, bring more literature and
philosophy into my own life. And now if you're
at a fortunate to have this opportunity
to summarize everything that
I've learned from the past six years of
studying in this course, we'll address everything
from how to select the right books to how to build a sustainable
reading habit. And towards the
end of the course, I'll provide you with
two entry points, one-fourth philosophy
and one for literature in order to set up the
foundations for your readings. So there's absolutely
no time to waste. And I will see you in the
first-class for this course.
2. Finding The Right Books : Welcome and thank you for
making your way down here to the first episode or the
first-class of this course. And I'm super, super
excited to get started. And for the purpose of not
freaking anyone out here. And this episode is
going to tackle one of the most basic questions when it comes down to how do you bring more literature and
philosophy in your life, which is the question
of, how do I go about selecting
the right reads? So here you are walking
into a bookstore. You're looking at these shelves and you're thinking to yourself, man, there are a lot of books. How do I go about picking out the right ones for me to read? How do I avoid situations
like maybe buying a book and never finishing it because he didn't
like it enough. How do I go about filtering
through these books based on my personal
interests in this class, I'm gonna give you
four principles for selecting Books and a very neat little
technique for you to hopefully find the
right books to read. Principle number one is to seek recommendations from
people you respect. Personally, I take a
lot of recommendations from my professors
because currently I've just wrapped up my bachelor's degree and Brennan venture into
postgraduate studies. So I have a lot of these gaps and my schedule where
I could jibber, jabber with these
professors and fish out some of these gray recommendations
from these professors. So here's a bit of a
funny story when I was in my Samuel Beckett phase. So there was a little face
where it was very much interested in works
of semi or Beckett. My Irish literature professor
actually wrote a book, maybe, maybe ten years
ago on Samuel Beckett. And he's candidate by check
the book from the library and ended up reading it
and ended up liking it, ended up loving adding fact
that I eventually base my graduation paper on
this very, very good book. The same principle
applies to you. If you have a very
well-read friend, if you have a very
knowledgeable on tape or if you have one of these mentor
figures that you really, really respect, seeking
book recommendations from these people is probably one of the
best ways that you can go about finding the
right books to read. Principle number two
is to seek books from the bibliography of
contemporary non-fiction books. Now the term
bibliography tends to freak a lot of people
out because we don't exactly have a lot of positive memories associated
with bibliographies. It has that very
scary-looking list with a bunch of citations, with a bunch of words at
the very end of the book. Ordinarily, when people pick up a non-fiction book
from the bookstore, they don't even
bother to look at this bibliography without
realizing that, hey, there's a lot of gold in these bibliographies
census or if you find a good non-fiction
book on the literature, philosophy I want to read. The author would have done
a lot of research for you. And the author probably drew from the original sources or at the original texts of these pieces of literature and philosophy that you
potentially want to read. So sometimes essentially
all you have to do is to go back to the very end of
the block and seek out this list of bibliography. And based on your
personal interests, you can probably extract some original title
is from this book. And because you've already defined the scope
for what you're interested in through selecting a very good non-fiction book, the bibliography will supply
you with a very good, very good preliminary
reading list. And principle number three, building upon the
previous point, is to create a repository or a TPR list for all
of the books that you want to read
right now, most, if not all of us
are experiencing information overload and to really define your own
tastes, your own interests, and your own trajectory
with her own personal, literary and
philosophical education, you really have to create
your own personal TPR list. And that's why I
personally, sometimes I could be a little bit
reluctant to recommend books because I personally
don't believe in a universal reading list or universal canon that
everyone should read. And I want you to spend a lot of time thinking about what do I want to learn about the
world, what interests me, and what specific
areas in literature and philosophy tickle my fancy and use this list as linchpin to apply the rest of the
principles in this course. And the fourth and
last principle is perhaps the most
pleasurable principle, is to wander around and to
wonder through a bookstore. I remember there
was an episode and pretend it's a city
were friendly. But what's basically
said that bookstores are disappearing and everyone's
ordering books from Amazon. And this phenomenon is really preventing people
from experiencing that sensation of grabbing a random book off the shelf
and end up loving it. Even though you
can have two most clearly defined reading list. Even though you can assign yourself and prescribe
your some of these great books,
literature and philosophy. It is still important to open
yourself up to surprise us. It is still important
for you to let your intuition guide
your reading process. And one of the ways to
do that is to go through a bookstore and
see what you like. Pull off a book off the shelf, read a little bit
at the bookstore, and then maybe buy a book on
a spot them finished reading that book on the spot in conjunction with
principle number three, which is to build your own
personal reading list. The fourth principle
will bring more variety to your reading and to keep
everything kind of exciting. So spend more time wondering
through bookstores. So take these four principles, run with them, test them out. And I'll see you in the
next class where we get to talk about building
a solid reading habit.
3. Building A Consistent Reading Habit : Welcome to this
class on building a solid and sustainable
reading habit. And in this episode
we're going to tackle the question of how do you squeeze reading into
an otherwise busy life? Let's face it, we're
busier than ever nowadays, and it is actually very, very difficult to spare time to read is actually very
difficult to even conceptualize the
idea of squeezing something as heavy as literature and philosophy into reschedule. This class was set up a
pretty good foundation for how to build a reading habit that's both a
sustainable and productive. And just like the
previous class, there are four principles
for how to build a very sustainable reading
habit principle number one is the principle of consistency. And I've actually made
a dedicated video for this on my YouTube channel. It is free and it is titled
How to be a prolific reader. And you can check that out. I'll attach to video in
the resources section. But to summarize that video
with the principle of consistency basically means that it is actually better
for you to read small amounts per day and
to sustain a reading habit, comparative reading 100 pages a day and running out of steam. Science fiction
author Ray Bradbury actually gave us a
very important tip, which I won't waste
more time explaining because it was covering
that entire video. So without further ado,
principle number two, which is to set out
a dedicated time to read every single day based on the principle
of consistency, you want to be very,
very deliberate with what chunk of time are you going to dedicate towards tackling literature
and philosophy? Because some of the books
that you will encounter on your journey here
will be very heavy, will be very complicated. We'll be pretty
difficult to read. So you really want to select your prime time for reading as a right
before you go to bed. Is it first thing in
the morning is a during your lunch break from
work, what is it? Be very deliberate about
which chunk of time are you going to spur out for
doing your reading? Personally, I adore reading
on a train because there's this one-hour long train ride
for me to get University. And this hour-long
journey for me is the perfect time to settle down and to
get some pages sound. And a duration of these blocks
can be pretty flexible. And I personally recommend beginners to start
with 30 min a day. Remember, you never want
this daily chunk of reading to get too big that I
start to overwhelm you. And overtime we can build
on this foundation of 30 min and stretch your
reading into an hour or 2 h, or even maybe 3 h down the line, I've attached a series
of worksheets in the resources section for
you to track your reading. So check them out and
start building your habit. And principle number three, very closely related to
principle number two, is to select a location
that you like. One of the things that
I've realized is that I actually don't really
like reading at home. I find the home environment loaded too distracting
for reading theirs. Too many things going on. There's the kitchen right
there to make food. There is the TV right here
where I can watch Netflix. For me, the perfect spot
to rate is actually this little cafe next
to the State Library. I really enjoyed a ritual of
grabbing a cup of coffee, sitting down, settling
down into my favorites. See that the cafe, and of course for
different people, these locations could
look very different. It could be a park,
it could be a cafe, or it could be in the
little corner in the attic. You'll want to make
your environment as enjoyable as possible so that environment
would really provide you with any extra resistance. And a fourth and a final
principle is actually to resist reading
a lot of books. In a video that I've referenced from principle number one, there was a quoting that
video by Alexander Pope, which characterize people
who read a lot of books. Understanding none of them ask book full blockheads, ignorant. They read, essentially
it's better to read a few books well and to
understand them thoroughly. Instead of reading 20 books without understanding a
thing from any of them. And what's really cool
about the stealing of reading habits down to tackling just a few really good books, is that a would no longer provide any stress
and your schedule, you're no longer experiencing
that fear of missing out. All you have is one book
that you wish to read really well to apply the
first three principles to, in summary, a bytecode, a principle of consistency. Don't stress yourself out with a very big reading amount
each day and carve out a specific duration in your day where you
can settle down to read in addition to your block of reading at your
favorite location, and also resist the urge to
read too many books at once. And that concludes a crash
course on how to build a solid and consistent and
sustainable reading habit. Check out a worksheets
and the video down in the resources section, and I will see you
in the next class.
4. Ways of Reading : Now, at this point
in the course, you've probably selected a
bookseller you want to read, and you've probably
started building a pretty stable and
consistent reading habit. And now we have to draw very important
distinction before we move on to the
two entry points, wonderful philosophy
and one for literature, which are kinda like the
juice of this entire course. And the distinction here that we have to make before we move on is the idea that different books need to
be read differently. Because with books
is rather tricky, they all look the same. They have different
covers of course, but fundamentally the
form of the book is kinda the same Derek
collection of different words. Some of these words tend to
confuse the **** out of you. Some of these words are pretty, pretty enlightening and
the mistake beginner readers tend to make
the mistake of just running off with
their TPR and kind of like start to tackle
these books in more or less the same manner without realizing that there are fundamentally different
wastes that we need to treat philosophy
and literature. How you read a
philosophical treatise? The first pretty
significantly from how you would read a novel from
the literary tradition. And to help me
crystallize this inside, I'm going to draw
from this book by Charles to lose and feel
of square root of three. So the loses, the
20th century French philosopher and towards
the end of his life, he decided to sit down with his co-author and friend
Felix Guattari to write about this very
fundamental question of what is philosophy? And even though the
book itself is titled, what is philosophy it actually
dealt with aren't quite a bit one of the most
important distinctions that the loose drew in a book. What's the distinction
between the function of philosophy and a
function of literature? Literature for Deleuze
is a form of art. It's a form of art that's
supposed to create sensations and assets
within the reader. And he's worked with
Guattari artists, not chaos, but a composition of chaos that yields the vision or sensation. While philosophy,
on the other hand, is all about creating concepts, it's all about using concepts
to control the sense of chaos in the world or to bring
consistency to the chaos. And here's the loose
expressing it more elegantly. Philosophy wants to save the infinite by giving
it consistency. It lays out of plane of
eminence that 3D action of conceptual person a takes events or consistent
concepts to infinity. I want you to realize that fundamentally literature
and philosophy are both trying to
confront chaos. Because let's face it, life
is a very confusing thing. And human beings for
thousands of years, I've been trying
to figure out what this life thing really is. And most, if not all, intellectual progress and
artistic progress pertains to this containing of chaos
or to remolding of chaos. And you as a reader, your
job is essentially to learn all these different
ways of dealing with chaos. So when you come in
contact with him, you have the tools to philosophy and literature
to back you up. But still, when we returned to the ground level of
reading these works, because philosophy
is fundamentally about concept creation, you need to read it in
a more analytical way compared to reading literature. And for literature,
there exists ways of reading and there exists
different forms of literary criticism to help us extract what's meaningful
from the test, even though the base action
is very much the same, you are colliding your
eyes through words. You're trying to figure
out what the words mean. The mechanisms behind
different ways of reading should not be neglected even though it
seems self-evident enough. But that's what the next two episodes are going to be for. The following episodes
contain two entry points. One for philosophy of
one for literature to orientate yourself with
these new ways of reading. And if there's one takeaway from this episode is should be this, you cannot treat
literature the same way that you treat philosophy. Stay tuned for the
next two episodes where I will explain how to treat these two genres or
two disciplines differently. So you get a notepad out. There's a lot of
information coming your way and let us move on.
5. Entry Point #1: Philosophy : Welcome to this
episode, kathleen, a very foundational basis
of how to enter philosophy. How to enter one of the
most nebulous fields out there in all
academic disciplines. Step before I start,
I want to tell you a little story of
something that have happened to me during the last
semester of my undergrad. So it was asserted a semester, I was all boiled off. I was all fired up the study more literature
and philosophy. So I sat down at a
cafe on campus with a pile of books with
my little notebook. So I was working out a
problem in my head that had something to do with a
paper that I was riding. My friend Thomas and his friend, they're both computer
science majors. They walked in and they saw me. They said high, they ordered or coffees and they sat
down and they asked me, hey Robin, What are you doing? I said two, I'm reading
something from my class. I'm reading this
ethics thing when they press me to explain
what I was reading, I kind of struggled a
little bit because, well, philosophy and literature are two subjects that are just so difficult to explain people who don't
really study them. And at the very end of this extended rant that I gave him, his friends said something to me which I will
never, ever forget. He said to me, are students
of philosophy all like you. Do, you guys just sit around and think, that's all you do? And that response is
going to kick off this episode on how do you find your way into this huge
discipline of philosophy? How do you anchor yourself in such nebulous concepts and
nebulous theory spanning across a few thousand years of Western civilization or the western
intellectual discourse. Before I start here, here's a very important
sort of pointer. When I talk about philosophy in this class, in this episode, I'm mainly going to be addressing the
Western tradition of philosophy because
Eastern philosophy tend to use radically
different tools, compare it to
western philosophy. Even a framework of thinking
are very different. So this episodes concern is mainly going to be a
Western philosophy starting from the
ancient Greeks to bring something back from the
previous episode on wine, different books need to
be read differently. Philosophy is principal
concern is to create concepts to
deal with chaos, to bring us sort of consistency
to our environment. And some of the biggest
questions in philosophy are questions that are
very nebulous in nature. Questions like, what is life? How do we be good people? How does reality function? How do we know
anything for certain? Where, how do we know
anything at all? And through confronting
these problems head on through contending with
that chaos of not knowing, these philosophers ended up
creating systems of concepts, then you as a reader now
have to contend with. So just like many other
episodes in this course, we are going to divide
this entry point into four different point or short
for different principles. Principle number one is to get a very general brief overview of the entirety of the
intellectual tradition, or at least to Western
intellectual tradition, because philosophy is simply not systems of thinking
that are floating out there in outer
space that are just kinda like for you
to grasp onto. Or it's not just a
matter of man in a, in a library dreamy of concepts and theorizing
about reality. Many of the philosophical
treatises that you will read after
watching this course, they are going to
be very partial to their historical periods. Different people throughout
history were occupied with different concerns that we're thinking about
different things. They were using different
frames of thinking because history dictates what
they could think about, what they were thinking
about and what is considered as productive to think
about in that period. The thoughts that I
always thinking at the cafe on campus
at the very start of the semester are very
different thoughts compared to what Kant was thinking
when he was dreaming up. He's granted
epistemological system. So without a very broad overview
of the entire history of the philosophical tradition is actually pretty
difficult for you to figure out why is that
person thinking that way? What is the significance of the system that
they've developed and what insights from
distinct her are outdated and worrying signs can I use to better my own life? And when I say get a
very general overview, the overview can be very,
very, very general. Note that your concern
here is not to develop a very comprehensive
understanding of every single literal
thinker on this timeline. Instead of placing your
focus on technicalities, you have to place a
focus on movements. And a very good question
to ask yourself is, what is this thinker trying to fight against or what is
this thinker refuting, given that philosophy,
in its essence, a series of debates
and arguments. And because now we live in a
bright age of digital media, it's actually easier
than ever to get this general overview of the philosophical
traditions right now, there are many great
non-fiction books that are very accessible to the general
reading public that aim to cover these debates
and these things in history that had
happened in philosophy. Not to mention, there are also podcasts that you
can listen to it. There are also YouTube
videos that you can watch, and they're also online
lectures that you can watch to help you
build this very, very broad and general
understanding of the history of
Western philosophy in the resources section, I'm going to list
out a few very, very good introductions to
the history of philosophy. Remember when you're
trying to build this entire timeline of
philosophical debates, your concern should be a
very broad over stroke to understand the movements, to understand in
very general terms what these thinkers
were tackling without getting bogged down into the nitty-gritties of
one specific thinker, because reading
philosophy out of its historical contexts
can be very dangerous. Person one, number two for this entry point
is actually pretty counter-intuitive for
a lot of students of philosophy or beginner
readers of philosophy. So after you've gained
a very general overview of the philosophical traditions. Now you are ready to tackle
one thinker in-depth. Many philosophy professors
and students tend to recommend Plato as
the first-person to start because well, all roads lead to Rome
and all the philosophy. It can be summarized
as footnotes to Plato. But in this course I'm
going to argue that you actually don't have
to start from Plato. I personally do not
start from Plato because my major is
actually in literature. To my entry point into
philosophy is actually from critical theorists and sonar
works of Walter Benjamin. But because all of these
thinkers have their footing or have their grounding in
the philosophical tradition. And because philosophy
ultimately leads back to Plato, I was able to engage with my
favorite thinker first and to use that thinker asked
my way back to Plato. And that's how I
want you to enter philosophy after you've gained an overview of the timeline
or the history of philosophy, there are certain
thinkers that will interest you more than others. And it is okay if Plato doesn't interest,
you run off the bat. It is actually more
productive to focus on the thinker that
you like the most, the thinker that you really, really appreciate
and whose problems that you find
really interesting. And to use that thinker
as a starting point for you to read every one on
his timeline in depth. Because except a
few fringe cases, philosophers love to reference other philosophers before
them or after them. And given that philosophy is a series of debates
and arguments and refutations and different considerations
and philosophical systems. It's actually very
easy to use if you're a thinker
as the linchpin to tie together all of these
thinkers on the timeline, e.g. in Jacques Derrida
work of primatology, he drew very heavily from the
enlightenment philosopher Jacques Rousseau and of
course Plato himself. So as I was going through
it attached are a lot of these references that I
don't really understand. There are a lot of
these homogenous to John Jacques
Rousseau and Plato. And whenever I read a
concept or a sentence that references back to
Rousseau and Plato, that gives me an excuse for
me to actually read Plato and Rousseau to see how these two thinkers
influenced Derrida, who actually makes sense
that Derrida himself, this is how you make philosophy
yours and this is how you make the entire process
a lot more interesting. Because when you reference
back to the ancients, you're no longer just studying the ancients for the sake
of studying the ancients, you're actually
placing them into the context of your
favorite thinker. From that point, you'll be
given the liberty to customize your personal reading list or to customize your own little TPR
for your philosophy books. Because instead
of just following the standard trajectory
of you have to understand Plato before
you can understand a car. If you have to
understand the core before you understand cont, instead of falling that
very dry laid out track, you are able to select something that you are
actually interested in. Person one number
three is the principle of tackling difficulty head-on, because philosophers
sometimes go riding these very turgid ways that are just difficult as
heck to understand. And academia sometimes
prides itself in being able to get lost
in the sea of jargon, this sea of specialized
terminologies. That's the seas of definitions that it
tends to put a lot of people off from engaging with philosophy in the first
place is this very, very difficult style that
you have to contend with. But at the end of the day,
you have to realize that philosophers are still people. Philosophers are people who tend to think a lot and the way that they express their
ideas might not be the best way through writing, through writing these
long paragraphs. Fundamentally, there's
still concerned with very simple questions. Fundamentally, they're still
asking questions about some of the most basic
concepts of reality. They're still trying
to figure out things that children tend to
ask when they were younger. If you ever little
nephew or niece, they tend to ask you all
sorts of silly questions. But if you stop and
to think about it, philosophy is technically just addressing these questions in a different style or in a more advanced
manner when you're lost in a sea of difficulty, always return yourself back to the seat being a human being, and always return your soft to a sense of curiosity
and the motivation to learn more about the world when you're going
through something impenetrable or something that's borderline driving
you and saying, go take a walk, start
from ground zero. Even though this could look like the most complicated paragraph ever written by an
author is a tackling. Some foundational problem
about reality is a tackling. How do we know? What
we know is a tackling? What does it mean to
be a good human being? Is a tackling. Why is a chair a chair
and why does it exist and constantly re-center
yourself when you're lost in the weeds, when you're lost in the
woods of philosophy. Because if you don't, you
can simply lose sight of the entire forest in favor
of staring at a single tree. And principle number
four is to get used to annotating your books. Get used to putting plastic
flags and annotations on your books because
that's his radar or student of philosophy. Your job or your aim is to extract arguments
from the salon test. It's also the case that
you need to grasp onto the key big ideas
before we can dive into the nitty-gritties
and the ability to distinguish what is a big
idea and what is just explaining this big idea is something that requires
practice and training is something that requires
a very specific set of techniques and specific
ways of annotating. And that's something
that I will address in the second course of the
series on back to the basics, how to M Tape books, how to get the most
out of a book. All the tools that
you can use to extract information from
philosophical texts. Dosa going to be the concerns
of the second course. So for now, remember
first of all, to get a very general overview of the philosophical tradition. Second of all, select
the thinker that you really like and to use that thinker as your entry
point into philosophy. And whenever distinct or is
confusing the **** out of you because the style is
very difficult to read. Always returned to
the fundamental problems of philosophy. Always returned to
that childlike wonder. And to anchor that
thinker to your wonders. And last of all, start treating philosophical reading as a kind of training as the
kinda thing that you have to do over and over and over again before
you're good at and to the point where you're
able to look at a paragraph and immediately understand what the big idea is or what the concerns
of the author is, or what this guy is
philosophizing about. And that concludes the first
entry point into philosophy. Some of the fundamental basics of how to treat philosophy as a discipline or how to read philosophy books
without losing her mind. In the next class, we will outline how to
tackle literature, because it is very, very
different from philosophy. And I look forward to seeing you there for now and
take some notes, synthesized everything,
and I will see you soon.
6. Entry Point #2: Literature : Welcome to this
portion of the course, what we're going to give you
a comprehensive introduction to the world of literature. Now keep in mind
that literature, comparative philosophy is a
much more nebulous feeling. It's very difficult to pin
down what is literature. And it's also very hard to
pin down at the effects that literary work will have on you
if you read it thoroughly. So the aim with this section
of the course is to give you a very comprehensive
introduction to this wonderful
world of letters, of poets and of literary giants. First of all, we
have to bring back a distinction from one
of the previous classes, which is to view literature
as a form of art. Instead of treating the text
as a collection of concepts, Literature demands you to treat the text as a series
of assets and sensations that you
have to absorb in order to extract the meaning
out of this piece of text. And again, Deleuze
synthesized with beautifully in his book,
what is philosophy? In a violently poetic text, Lawrence describes were produced as poetry slash literature. People are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them. And on the underside of
which they draw a firmament. And right there at
conventions and opinions. But poets, artists make
a slit in the umbrella. They tear open a firmament itself to lead in
a bit of free on Wednesday chaos and
to frame and a sudden light of vision that
appears through the rent. And that in short, is the
purpose of literature. It's all about
exposing the reader to limited amounts of chaos or compartmentalized chaos in favor of constructing that a world's, that'll cosmos
that are contained within the piece of literature. The author of Ulysses
and Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce famously
characterized these little worlds that the authors have
created as Cosmos. And within these little
worlds, characters come alive, stories come alive, and of
course, dialogue comes alive. So before I dive into
the principles of accessing these
wonderful little, little worlds were
a little consonants that the riders have created. You have to realize that human beings are
storytelling machines. When you meet a friend that you haven't seen for a little while, the first urge is to tell them a story about your
life on a spot, at a bar or at a cafe, because that's how we orientate
ourselves in a world. That's how we make sense of the oldest chaos around us
is through telling stories. In that sense, storytelling is a gift enabling
every human being. And this is a gift
that we can use to our advantage
as readers reading a great novel is essentially about changing that story within your head to enable you to see shades of gray from
different walks of life. And the act of introducing
you to different worlds, different walks of life and different forms
of light that are alien to your own is to
job of a storyteller. And that brings us to
the first principle of access and literature. Just like you have to
go out of your way to find pieces of literature
that resonated with you, given the artistic
nature of literature, sometimes going out
there to a bookstore, it's kinda like browsing
through to catalogs on Spotify. You're not quite sure whose
music you're into just yet, but you're open to
new experiences. You're open to new authors. You're open to their
ways of creating these little worlds for you
to immerse yourself in. I remember very clearly
when I turn 18, my aunt actually got me a whole collection of Proust's
in search of lost time. And I remember reading
the first volume, swans way at a holiday resort. And that was one of the
best experiences ever. It somehow my surrounding
at the time blended perfectly with
Proust's descriptions. And I was really
able to slow down, and I appreciate every
page of masterful novel. If literatures have reflection
of the human condition, then you have to find
those slivers of human condition that is going
to be redemptive for you, that is going to be
immersive for you, or that is going to be
enjoyable for you to read. There's this idea that there are these masterpieces that you have to finish reading
before you die. But that to me is disregarding the whole
point of literature. If a piece of
literary work is not resonating with you right now, then put it aside,
read something else, maybe come back to it in
a few years, but never, ever suffer through a book
just because the book is supposed to be good by
other people's standards. And that brings us to
principle number two, which is to lose yourself
in the narrative. Good piece of fiction
or good piece of narrative should be a very
immersive experience. Same way Proust was for me
when I started reading it. But with the entire culture of academic elite is
coming literature. There's this urge
to try to analyze every single little sentence before you get to
finishing entire story. Author of how to read
a book more time at J Adler explained
it beautifully. Some readers, when they really like a novel, want to savor it, to pause over it, to dry out the reading of
it for as long as they can. But in this case
they're probably not so much reading the
book as satisfying. They're more or less
unconscious feelings about the events and the
characters read quickly. We suggest with total immersion, we have indicated
the importance of letting an imaginative
book work on you. That is what we mean
by the latter phrase, let the characters
into your mind and heart suspend your disbelief. If such it is about the events. Try as hard as you
can to living in his world nodding yours. They're the things he does maybe quite understandable
and do not trust the world as a whole until
you are sure that you have lived in and to the
extent of your ability, a short dome giving
to the urge of analyzing a piece of literature before finishing it
in our own lives, we can only make sense
of events in retrospect, in the forms of stories. And if literatures
a direct reflection of human experience than a principal stance
that we have to finish a novel before we can savor it, before we can go
back to it and think about it in Princeton
one number three is all about the style of the writing in a piece of
literature for an author, aside from stories,
style is the instrument. Style is the way of
conveying these stories in philosophy of
words are constantly referencing concepts
and systems. Worse and literature of words
are constantly trying to produce visions and
sensations within the reader. So the first step of
literary criticism is to pay attention to the style. And certain styles are highly specific to their
historical contexts. Thinking in terms of
cause and effect, how is the style
making you feel? Why did the writer
choose to specific style and what experience that this paragraph create within you. And there are certain
cases in literature, especially in the 20th century
when literary modernism was a thing where sometimes style tends to overtake stories. One of the most famous examples
is James Joyce's Ulysses. Nothing much happening to book. It was about one day
in Dublin in 1904, but the book turned out
to be a smorgasbord of every style humanly imaginable
in English language. So when you're tackling
is something that has a very specific focus
on prose or style. Make sure to do some preliminary
readings into the choice of the styles before you start absorbing yourself
into the narrative. And principle number four is to engage with literary criticism. What if I told you that there's
a whole career out there for people just to read
literature and write about them. Some of these literary
critics have dedicated their entire lives to
critiquing literature, to reading books at such an expert level
that they were able to make connections that you
and I can't make just yet. So through engagement
with literary criticism, through academic
journals and through contemporary non-fiction
books on literature. It's kinda like
offering yourself a little cheat code
in a video game where you're able to accelerate your progress with their
literary interpretation. What I find personally is that after I finished
a piece of novel, Reading criticism on
top of that novel, just kinda like the
icing on a cake. It adds so many more
layers to my reading so that by the time I
walk away from a novel, after I've read criticism, the understanding of the
novel is a combination of personal experience and expert opinions in a future on
my main YouTube channel, especially, I want to
work on a project of delivering literary criticism
to the general public. Because I feel like
this is especially a corner of academia that people like to guard
away from the general public. But I want to open up the
gates to show everyone a power of close reading and the power of literary
appreciation. And that concludes this section of how to enter literature. And I hope you guys
have enjoyed it, and I will see you in
the concluding chapter.
7. Conclusion: Why Intelligent Reading Matters : Welcome to the last
episode of this course. And I hope you have
gained a lot of value from the
preceding episodes. And here we are going to address something
quite fundamental. So I get a lot of comments in the Instagram DMs
basically asked me the question of why should we
bother with reading at all? Why should we read
in the first place? I mean, you're here talking
about how to read better, how to read deeper, uh, how
to become better readers. If we zoom all the way out, what is the purpose of a
liberal arts education? And what is the purpose of bothering with these
volumes of books, instead of worrying
about the real problems in the world right now, personally, I think the
younger generation, especially in my generation, were dealing with some
brand new problems that we've never ever
seen ever before. Which means we can no longer use the same tools to
treat new problems. And here is where requisite
variety comes in. In short, requisite
variety means that you have to
have more tricks up your sleeves compared to the problems that
you're dealing with. And I was thinking
about this idea of requisite variety in the
context of critical thinking. So how do we think critically
in a 21st century when so many sources of
media are trying to conform us to one
way of thinking. And I personally think this is really weird literature and philosophy comes in by engaging with difficult texts and
through contrast and comparing different
worldviews and contrasting, comparing different
philosophical systems in the past or at different forms
of literature in the past. It's able to build
within your minds such a vast collection of different variables or
such a vast collection of different ways of viewing. We're on problem that encases someone's trying to
bring you down into just one worldview in
case someone's trying to incur you down to one
belief system or one dogma. You're basically able to jump out of that perspective
because you have so many different points
of references to go-to. For me, it's really about
jailbreaking your mind. It's really about releasing
yourself from dogma, releasing herself from
unquestioned beliefs and biases. If you engage with literature and philosophy productively, you are able to turn yourself
into a free thinking human beings with such variety
going on in your brain. So then when we
encounter a practical or a societal
problem in reality, we're able to draw
from this faculty of critical thinking and
to invent new solutions, new perspectives,
and new systems of thinking to help the
world move forward. And that's really my hope for you at the end of this course, hopefully you're able
to take in some of these lessons and to
treat literature and philosophy as a very important
aspect of your life to the point where you're able to intelligently deal
with these texts, intelligently read
through source texts, and intelligently deal
with problems in a world. And ask those
different perspectives and your brain start to congeal and asked to start to develop brand new ways of
thinking about a problem. That is to start with
your pursuit of wisdom. And that is where we
can bring reading into our lives to help us
live more intelligently. Thank you so much for
checking out this course and sticking with me
till the very end. And I will see you
in the next one. Happy reading and take care.
Robin Waldun, Writer/YouTuber
