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Holy Mother of God Semper. You could start a conspiracy lending library with that little lot! Just to clarify, you were referring to me specifically with that "rarefied intellects" remark, weren't you? Good. I just wanted to straighten that out.
And might I just add that I love love love Elvis. He can be my new philosophy buddy.
No, I couldn't list my library. I wouldn't want to even bother listing fiction. I might photograph a small part of my philosophy section. It represents a small fraction of the materials I own. Which also represents a small fraction of the materials I have read. The mind of man through time has been my constant study.
There is a space on my bookshelf that is empty though. It used to hold my copy of Fritjof Capra's "The Tao of Physics."
I lent it to my buddhist doctor. He told me he is reading it. He is finding it interesting.
He gave me his email. I may give him some of my 110% crazy wisdom teaching.*
It's probably too much for him though. I don't think I'll become a guru, after all. I'll just stick with being a househusband.
You see, it was reading all those philosophy books that did it. It turned me into the sorcerer supreme, master of the mystic arts. It's just a joke; although my nan always told me that I had the most marvellous imagination:
http://www.allthingswilliam.com/imagination.html wrote:
He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.
~ William Blake, in The Life of William Blake, Volume II (1863). Prose Writings. Descriptive Catalogue, Number IV (1809)
Imagination, the real and eternal world, of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in our eternal or imaginative bodies when these vegetable, mortal bodies are no more.
~ William Blake, from Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion (1804).
To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination, and I feel flattered when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil and Milton in so high a rank of art? Why is the Bible more entertaining and instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the imagination, which is spiritual sensation, and but mediately to the understanding or reason?
~ William Blake, in The Letters of William Blake (1906). Letter to the Reverend John Trusler (23 August 1799)
The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.
~ William Blake, from Milton, a Poem in 2 Books (1804).
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity ... and some scarce see Nature at all. But, to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is imagination itself.
~ William Blake, in The Letters of William Blake (1906). Letter to the Reverend John Trusler (23 August 1799)
The world of imagination is the world of eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated [i.e. mortal] body. This world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the eternal realities of everything which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature.
~ William Blake, from A Vision of the Last Judgment (c. 1810).
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.
~ William Blake, from Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion (1804).
What is now proved was once only imagined.
~ William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93). Proverbs of Hell
* apologies to Chogyam Trungpa
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