A PILGRIMAGE
“The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out [of] an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other.
It is best to have both.”
“Sri Ramakrishna used to say, ‘As Long as I Live, so long do I learn’. That man or that society which has nothing to learn is already in the jaws of death.”
I am going on a “pilgrimage”.
But first, the why.
A SPECIAL EDITION POST*
*Can I call it such a thing when hardly anyone reads this sh*t and I haven’t posted since July? Alas…
I fear many things.
More than any of late,
it’s the human capacity to forget.
In 2020,
What happened two days ago no longer matters.
The importance of reflection, discourse and contemplation in our society at a given time can be quantified. The quantification of this importance requires no complex math nor machine learning, but rather may start with some simple reverse engineering of the time we allocate in media and mind to understanding and learning from our most troublesome events (voyeurism, of course, not factoring in as a form of contemplation).
I’d say joyous events, too, but those don’t make the news anymore.
I miss the comics section.
Every decade is defined by an array of tragedies, and every person’s ability (or lack thereof) to cope with the absurdities of life is in some way teethed on those that stood out in history as they grew up .
For me, one was Columbine. The world stood still that day. I was 9 and recall it vividly. I remember being not particularly sad so much as deeply curious as to what they, the two boys who’d shot so many classmates and then themselves, were sad about. I couldn’t understand it. Until then, high school had seemed like a dream to peer towards.
Why were they so angry?
Both myself and the nation chewed on this for months.
Terribly, school shootings (and mass shootings by extension) have become, well, normalized. What once captivated our minds and ached our hearts now pulls people from TikTok for a few minutes or so (or worse yet, it’s within TikTok that they learn of and work through a given crisis).
Not long after, 9/11 happened. It shaped my world and everyone else’s. I’ll never forget watching the second plane hit on live TV before school. A presumed accident became a premeditated attack in seconds, on New York and everything it stood for.... on us, on you, on me. The government grounded all flights for days and there were no planes in the sky for the first time in my life. I was in middle school. I still remember the sunken feeling in my stomach the first time I saw a plane again after the initial moratorium. I wondered how we’d ever know which ones of the many above us could be trusted.
Not even the sky was safe anymore.
The news was solely focused on 9/11 for months. Every channel. Turning through our TV from station to station, I recall seeing every single one, even Comedy Central and Cartoon Network, breaking from usual programming to process aloud what none of us could process within.
Pain and suffering are horrible, especially en masse. Yet I don’t fear them in and of themselves as much these days. I fear how we react to them, and how those reactions have changed over time.
Over 50 people were murdered in Las Vegas a few years ago and hardly anyone gave a shit a week later.
Our president retweeted a video of a man chanting “White Power” this year and it went almost unnoticed. Mind you, he also called several nations “shithole countries” and made over 22,000 verifiable lies while president. The world is, as you’re surely aware by now, dying, and yet some people still see other political issues as somehow independent of or more important than an approaching self-induced apocalypse.
Tempers have risen, as have literal temperatures.
Our Earth, and ourselves, are on fire.
Quick we are (often myself included) to diagnose the problem or tout remedies or both. Slow we are to consider the other side. Slower still are we to consider that perhaps, in some slightly different but comparable circumstances, the event or issue in question has already occurred in our history. By reverse engineer I mean to measure the period of time we allocate to anything, from despair to elation. Whether it be the result of infinite scroll or of a desire to move on, there’s no question that we move too fast, and in the process, we miss the most important part of the story…
“now”.
The inverse of this measurement of time is the answer to our proverbial equation. The less time we spend sitting with an issue, the farther we are away from the last time something similar happened in the past. Not farther as measured by finite time necessarily. But farther in our hearts, less and less likely to learn from the past and those who endured it. We go in blind when we’ve already got the map.
Out of these points I’ll note four core concerns of mine and one remedy that I hope to take on, in a deliberate and semi-formalized capacity, for the next decade. This I call my pilgrimage, which I’ll expand on below. I anticipate that this remedy will come to define this blog hereafter, or at least to such an extent as to warrant this post as a divergence from my usual ramblings about why some obscure staircase in the Bronx is worth an hour on public transit to visit (despair not my fellow foamers, those spatial tangents will remain the silk thread holding this sad excuse for a blog together in perpetuity). After expanding on these concerns and providing my imperfect proposal for a fix, I’ll loop in how I see the result of this long-game pursuit tying into and influencing the existing tenor of this blog*.
[*A side note that I’ve been meaning to address: I chose to embrace the word “blog” with pride. To those who afford themselves the self-assigned reverence of terms like “article” or “publication”: I’ll take your pomp and wipe my cavities with it. A nod here to Alan Moore, who refuses the term “graphic novel” for his self-described “comics”, known by any bookworm to be among the greatest contributions to storytelling in the last century, of any medium.]
I see these four as dampening and fracturing our capacity to flourish, leaving in the rotted cracks left behind a mold of malaise that threatens to swallow us all.
They are:
Concerns
1.The lack of interaction with and decreasing reliance on primary sources. We won’t hear someone or how they feel, instead we let our phones tell us what they said and what it means. The proliferation of synoptical podcasts that tell you what a book is about is a particularly poignant example of this. Darker still are news podcasts that surmise to tell you what’s important in 5 minutes or less, as though the most pressing matters of the day were digestible in such short spurts of time. Why I’m scared: you’re letting people think for you.
2. The human capacity to forget. It’s astonishing and frightening to watch our reactions and panic in the face of threat. This isn’t a critique on the emotional reaction, which is inherent. But it is a damning critique on our hubris for assuming we’re the first to face such monumental challenges. In this, the second of my four concerns, I’ll tip my hat northeast to Lewis Lapham, who I’ve been told works from a computerless office in Gramercy Park just a mile and a half from the desk I’m writing at here in Little Italy (he has his emails printed out and delivered to him by hand). Below, the legendary former editor of Harper’s describes the catalyst for his ongoing quarterly….please note that the last sentence is the most important:
"I had put together a collection of texts on the end of the world for the History Book Club. They wanted something at the turn of the millennium and I developed this idea by looking at the way the end of the world has ended [or been envisioned to end] many, many times and how predictions of doom have been spread across time. Whether you're talking about the Book of Revelation or tenth-century sects. So I had this wonderful collection of texts and I thought what a great idea. Also it was fun.”
- from a 2012 Smithsonian Magazine article titled “Lewis Lapham’s Antidote to The Age of Buzzfeed”
3. A lack of familiarity with and study of what it means to love. We discuss tragedy as though it’s the only potential outcome. If love is even referenced, it’s often in unhealthy and contorted versions of what most of us yearn to receive and give back. Children today know little of what it means to love unconditionally. This phenomenon is so pervasive that one could claim history as a discipline has been washed down to rote memorization of when and where people have harmed each other with minimal egregiousness. It’d be more helpful if we chronicled the instances of non-violent resistance and love across history with the same esteem. In staunch rebellion to this trend, I’m “in love with” Stanford’s course, “Love as a Force for Social Justice”, available for free on EdX.
Any look back into literature and the arts will reveal love as the perennial theme of our expression as a species. We absorb what we consume. And love is not an idea, it’s an action verb. There is no trial that has not already been faced in our history by love, and yet so often we speak of today’s calamities as though we’ve never encountered anything as dire. We must look back into the past and learn from those before us how to love.
Why I’m scared: I believe that the ultimate meaning of life, though beyond a label, is that which arises in oneself after pursuing unconditional love of others as one’s primary goal, every day. The impact that just one person imperfectly pursuing this goal has on the planet is infinite, for the effect that their love may have on one other person can translate to the next, and next, ad infinitum. The same could be said of hatred; this only further highlights the need for education on how to identify, provide, and receive love. I mean this is the most literal sense: it should be taught in public school as its own subject.
As Gandhi said of Tolstoy in the introduction to a 1908 publication of the two’s lettered correspondence (now known as “Letters to A Hindu”, which I strongly recommend):
“Leo Tolstoy's life has been devoted to replacing the method of violence for removing tyranny or securing reform by the method of nonresistance to evil. He would meet hatred expressed in violence by love expressed in self suffering. He admits of no exception to whittle down this great and divine law of love. He applies it to all the problems that trouble mankind.” - Mahatma Gandhi
To live in this way requires familiarity with how others have done it before us. This doesn’t happen through reading the r/showerthoughts sub-reddit. It takes work and permits no shortcuts...though Gandhi was on to something in noting that observing Tolstoy is a good start.
4. The narrowness of subject material to which we expose ourselves.
There are enough English period dramas on Netflix. And yet the average American has not been exposed to the wisdom of Lao Tzu’s writings, the beauty of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, the challenging but celestial discordance of Miles Davis’ or John Coltrane’s jazz recordings.
There’s nothing wrong with listening to the latest Taylor Swift or Tool album (a bad example because both were, to the surprise of many, incredible if not flawless). There’s nothing wrong with checking in on your friends’ social media or enjoying a show about people illicitly raising tigers, but we must resist the temptations to turn our brains off lest we open their back panels to infiltration by others…and yes that threat includes Russians.
There’s far more to this last one than simply expanding the reaches of our intellect. Our capacity to console and to understand and to love is directly proportional to the size of the artistic and intellectual net we cast. We humans are relational beings, and the more diverse our knowings, the more equipped we are to love diversely. This is not to say that there are not nor haven’t been those imbued with supreme, innate gifts of love from birth in spite of zero education, but for the rest of us mortals, love starts with knowing the story of those we wish to love (and the stories of those who’ve successfully “loved”) and those we’d otherwise, had we not read, not have even known needed loving.
Solution
I pride myself on prioritizing literature, the arts and the sciences over distractions like partying and binge-watching TV. This, like most pride, arises paradoxically out of insecurities I normally keep under lock and key. Namely, the fact that I largely threw my undergraduate education out the window in favor of having fun. This I don’t regret, as such recklessness and the repercussions of favoring “the wrong choices” impregnated me with an appreciation for failing fast and valuing mistakes. Dark turns taught me painful lessons that have radically informed the remainder of my life and gratitude for them has arisen slowly over time.
Still, at the surface level I wish nothing more than to fill gaps in my education. This I see as the problem I face at the scale of the individual. On the macro scale of society, I again fear the points I detailed in brief above. I see no quick solution for these issues, as they’ve not been “quick” problems in their development.
With that, I propose to develop a curriculum for myself, a system with some rigidity and yet enough malleability to bend in times of great cultural shift yet unseen and to come. I will elaborate on the expected contents of this list in a moment, but first, the why and how of a reading list of such breadth, and how my leading sentence on “pilgrimage” applies.
I consider myself to be a “moderate” empiricist, a bullshit term I’ve just coined; empiricists being those, such as John Locke, who believe that we begin life with a blank slate (tabula rasa) and over time develop a worldview and knowledge base rooted in their respective experiences. A proto-empiricist can be found in the ancient Indian philosopher Kanada’s Vaisesika Sutra, in which he claimed that perception and inference are the only two reliable sources of information. Seeing as this allows for flexibility with inferences ascribed to metaphysical and transcendental states perceived in spiritual exercise (versus rejecting them in a more rigid, materialist viewpoint), I tend to “dig it”. Still, I label myself moderate as if to raise a yellow flag on my soul, in that I believe we can substitute other’s experiences for our own so long as we try them ourselves in earnest. This ensures the certification of their said experience, or at least something close to it. Yes, the possibility of their accounts influencing our perception is real, but is that always a bad thing?
Simply put, I believe in “try before you buy”. Hence the need to consume as much of the wisdom of the past as possible, then try it out. To try it out, I’ve found, requires its application upon the most mundane of our experiences as human beings. The best of these, I believe,
is walking.
In summary: When an idea of how the world works or how I might work within it is offered up,
I test it out in walks.
This is nothing new. The idea of walking to find oneself is the essence of pilgrimage. I looked far and wide for a favored definition of pilgrimage, and unashamedly prefer Wikipedia’s current edit to that of Oxford English or Merriam-Webster:
“A pilgrimage is a journey, often into an unknown or foreign place, where a person goes in search of new or expanded meaning about their self, others, nature, or a higher good, through the experience. It can lead to a personal transformation, after which the pilgrim returns to their daily life.”
Now I’m nowhere near the first person to suggest walking for clarity or bonafide pilgrimages for spiritual discovery. Nor am I anywhere near the first person to suggest that an exhaustive “list” be made of what one should read or learn. This is nothing new. The autodidact is a recurring character in our history though these days they’re usually billed as self-help gurus with quick fixes to make you a data scientist in four days or give you abs by Friday while letting you eat infinite calories instead of long-game toilers on the journey towards selfless service. Likewise the pilgrim is as old as time.
Several concepts have been suggested and implemented in an attempt to create a “complete” line of study. In Western literature, the idea of the Great Books is simply that: to compile a list of the great books that have defined the Western World and without which a piece of our puzzle is lost.
St John’s University famously has no grades nor majors, with all students reading the Classics in tandem and learning to question the world and themselves along the way. Similarly, Mortimer Adler at the University of Chicago wrote the classic “How to Read a Book”, with guidelines on optimal absorption of material and a subsequent list of those he deemed iconic and paramount to the Western Canon. Adler later collaborated with Encyclopedia Britannica to create a purchasable set of these works, one that would be affordable to the masses. That set, Great Books of the Western World, will be my primary guide in addressing the West in the curriculum to follow.
Of equal interest (though to me a bit more interesting as I’m more drawn to the East) is the heroic effort by German-born Oxford philosopher and professor Max Müller, who dedicated his life to the preservation and translation of Eastern spiritual classics.
Over 31 years from 1879 - 1910 and in what I firmly believe to be one of the most impressive literary achievements of all time, Muller led a seemingly exhaustive effort to catalog and translate every major spiritual work of India and the Far East. Partnering with the government of then British-controlled India and countless Indian scholars, his team successfully completed the 50 volume work, Sacred Books of the East. To this day many of its volumes remain the only English translations available for the documents they cover. Of equal triumph was the decade-long effort by sacred.text.com (one of the oldest sites on the web) to digitize these works and make them available to the general public. They can be found, for free and in all their glory, here.
You’ve likely already picked up on the strong theological bent here. That is intentional. I fear any education positioning itself as “comprehensive”. Comprehensive for what? Finding a job?
If finding employment and “finding myself” were the two defining searches of my twenties, finding meaning is the essence of my 30s. The former two were well provided by my undergraduate education and first decade in the workforce. The latter is the primary path to which I’ve been drawn of late, and at risk of cliche I will say that it honestly felt like this shift happened approximately four hours into being 30 years old.
Note: If you’re going to read one book on finding meaning and have lost stamina in this article, stop reading my pompous filth and get the famed Holocaust survivor and psychologist Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.
Where I once my eyes rolled they now glow in wonder: theology, as I see it, is a field dedicated entirely to continually chiseling at the hard questions. Of relief to me is the fact that often it’s the chiseling that matters, not the end form that we’re left with or whether a comprehensible form is yielded at all. This journey-not-the-destination approach is not elementary but lived, a healthy respite from our striving to know-more-to-earn-more approach.
No one has, to my knowledge, better summarized the disparities in a science and business focused understanding of the world than Aldous Huxley. In the back of his book The Perennial Philosophy hides a short essay of his, simply titled “Beliefs”. That essay changed my life. Read it. Whereas I encourage a review of Man’s Search for Meaning for those embarking on just that, I chose The Perennial Philosophy as the one book, in any category, that I’d take to a desert island if forced to chose. To the naysayers who refute his thesis, I say humbug and commend his reaching for the stars within.
If you read one book on this whole list, read this book. Upon reviewing it on September 30th, 1945, The New York Times wrote that “Perhaps Mr. Huxley, in The Perennial Philosophy has, at this time, written the most needed book in the world.” Read the original NYTimes article here.
World War II had ended 28 days prior. If they felt that then, surely its contents and message apply now.
There are other gaps to be filled. I have no desire to cover all fields; still, any keen observer would note that people of colors’ contributions, save for Asian cultures, are few and far between on the lists. In this department I struggle most, but see that struggle as an opportunity for the greatest of reading excitements: the complete unknown. In researching where to start, I’ve compiled an amalgamation of books from African authors suggested by Barack Obama as well as ten authors suggested by a well-written “10 Black Authors Everyone Should Read List” in this article from PBS.
From President Obama (as suggested in a social media post on July 13th, 2018, complete with his thoughts after each):
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Return by Hisham Matar
and
The Ten Authors from the PBS List [of Black must-read authors]:
Maya Angelou
James Baldwin
Amiri Baraka
Octavia Butler
W.E.B. Du Bois
Ralph Ellison
Alex Haley
Langston Hughes
Zora Neale Hurston
Richard Wright
Toni Morrison
In addition, I’m adding to this “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, An American Slave, which played a pivotal role in the Abolitionist movement here in the United States.
Note: Additional modern texts of any type, whether Black literature or otherwise, are left out of these specialized sections (see below) as I plan to incorporate them and many others into my “Modern Fiction” and “Modern Non-Fiction” rotations. I make an exception for Obama’s list above.
The same could be said of Latino literature’s lack of attention in many lists; I plan to cover it with somewhere between 10 and 20 selections of our Book Riot’s list, found here. For indigenous authors, I admit a particular ignorance and will at least start with the first dozen or so crowdsourced favorites of GoodReads, several of which I’ve already been wanting to read for some time (see master list).
There are still countless other groups for whom it could be said I’ve not adequately given representation, such as the LGBT community, women, the disabled; the list goes on. I’ll say that rather than categorizing them into a “specialization” (as I’ve done with the others above), I’ll be prioritizing their inclusion within the existing categories and especially in my modern fiction / non-fiction rotations. These categories are for me and what I perceive to be my blindspots, so kindly avoid taking this as a declaration of what is and is not essential reading as it’s inherently personal. Still, I do ask that you bare with my ignorance and please send any recommendations (both in these categories and in general) to info@fletch.nyc
THE CURRICULUM
CORE
COURSE 1: EAST: Sacred Books of the East
COURSE 2: MODERN FICTION: of my choosing each rotation
COURSE 3: MODERN NON-FICTION: of my choosing each rotation
COURSE 4: WEST: Great Books of The Western World
UPPER DIVISION
COURSE 5: MYSTICISM: Every book in the Reading List found in back of the Perennial Philosophy - Aldous Huxley
COURSE 6: SPACE & PLACE: Every text in Columbia University, Department of Religion’s “Zones of Inquiry: Space” Reading List (see below)
SPECIALIZATIONS: to be included in whichever rotation they apply, i.e. “modern non-fiction, modern fiction, East, etc”
BLACK: Obama’s suggestions, works from Authors in the PBS List
NATIVE AMERICAN / INDIGENOUS: See list above, as pulled from crowdsourced ratings on GoodReads
OTHER UNDERREPRESENTED GROUPS: Included as I learn more about each respectively
ELECTIVES & EXTRACURRICULARS
Write every weekday morning
Read The Economist weekly
Read every column and book that my hero, Nicholas Kristof publishes
Read every quarterly from Lapham’s Quarterly
Listen to a full album daily
Watch a movie a month, from Roger Ebert’s list of Great Movies
FIELD TRIPS
Visit every new exhibit at The Met and MoMA
See one concert and/or other live performance a month (when COVID subsides)
LABORATORY
Meditate for 70 minutes every morning (already having been doing this daily since 2017)
One day per month, turn off all devices for 24 hours
Japa, throughout the day
One day a month minimum, visit a religious center, congregation or site (COVID permitting)
Last but not least, the very thing that I (try to) focus on in my writings. The notion of space vs place. I’ll refer you to my last article for more on that. My goal moving forward with this blog is to formalize what I’ve already been doing intermittently in my articles, which I’ll attempt to describe here in brief.
Walking is my therapy. It’s my religion, too. And if walking had a mecca (besides, uh, Mecca), it’s New York City. I walk to understand that which has been on my mind and then test it on my surroundings. I understand the essence of the Upanishads best when I watch humans in action on the streets. I can better consider what Georgia O’Keeffe was trying to evoke in her 1927 painting Radiator Building - Night if I walk by the literal Radiator Building, at night. Sometimes the connections are less clear. I may read the Tao De Ching’s description of how “the best” of us flow like water, and see as much in the way people and objects move about Manhattan. Once, on a trail in suburban Orange County that might not evoke the same impact that the Rockies have on many, I connected with how Albert Bierstadt seems to communicate the emotions felt in him by the land featured in his ornate paintings.
In all, I tend to gravitate towards three intertwined realms of thought: geography, theology/ontology, and psychology. As it so happens, I’m not the first to find wonder in this. Columbia University, just up the 1-2-3 train from my apartment and a place I do dearly hope to attend one day, has its MA in Religion program sub-divided into “Zones of Inquiry.
One such zone is “Space”, focused on exactly these questions over which I obsess. That the school is in New York is a beautiful coincidence. Each of the Department of Religion’s “zones” have a reading list attached. The final contribution to the core of my curriculum is its reading list (complete with their introductory paragraph below):
March 21, 2017 (created by Katherine P. Ewing) ZONE: SPACE While many (if not most) studies of religion take shape in a “place,” some essays, texts, and studies make place and space in various iterations a central project, interest, or trope. The readings in this list address a number of topics, including the relationship between culture and nature, nations, homelands, and other forms of political or religio-political formations, imagined and sacred spaces, the traversal of peoples across boundaries and on sacred journeys.
These texts, listed far below, will become specialization in my courseload, which I’ll being referring to moving forward as “Space and Place”.
SYLLABUS
COURSE 1: EAST
From “Sacred Books of the East”
1. Buddhism
Vol. 49: Buddhist Mahayana Text (2 Parts).
Vol. 11: Buddhist Suttas.
Vol. 10: The Dhammapada and Sutta Nipata.
Vols. 35 and 36: The Question of King Milinda (2 Parts).
Vol. 21: The Saddharma Pundarika or the Lotus of the True Law.
Vols. 13,17 and 20: Vinaya Text (3 Parts).
2. Chinese
Vols.3,16,27,28,39 and 40: The Sacred Books of China (6 Parts).
Vol. 19: The Fo-Sho-Hing-Tsan-King.
3. Islam
Vols. 6 and 9: The Qur'an (2 Parts)
4. Jainism
Vols. 22 and 45: The Jaina Sutras (2 Parts)
5. Parsis
Vols. 5,18,24,37 and 47: Pahlavi Texts (5 Parts).
Vols. 4, 23 and 31: The Zend - Avesta (3 Parts).
Vol. 50: A General Index to the Names and Subject - matter of the Sacred Books of the East.
6. Vedic Brahmanic System
Vol. 7: The Bhagavadgita with the Sanatsujatiya and the Anugita.
Vols. 29 and 30: The Grihya Sutras : Rules of Vedic Domestic Cermonies (2 Parts).
Vol. 42: Hymns of the Atharva Veda together with Extracts from the Ritual Books and the Commentaries.
Vol. 7: The Institutes of Vishnu.
Vol. 25: The Laws of Manu.
Vol. 33: The Minor Law Books.
Vols. 2 and 14: The Sacred Laws of the Aryas as Taught in the Schools of Apastamba, Gautama, Vasishtha and Baudhayana (2 Parts).
Vol. 1 and 15: The Upanishads (2 Parts).
Vols. 34 and 38: The Vedanta Sutras (2 Parts).
COURSE 2: WEST
From “Great Books of The Western World”
List and links selflessly assembled by the global community of Wikipedia.
Volume 1
Volume 2
Syntopicon I: Angel, Animal, Aristocracy, Art, Astronomy, Beauty, Being, Cause, Chance, Change, Citizen, Constitution, Courage, Custom and Convention, Definition, Democracy, Desire, Dialectic, Duty, Education, Element, Emotion, Eternity, Evolution, Experience, Family, Fate, Form, God, Good and Evil, Government, Habit, Happiness, History, Honor, Hypothesis, Idea, Immortality, Induction, Infinity, Judgment, Justice, Knowledge, Labor, Language, Law, Liberty, Life and Death, Logic, and Love
Volume 3
Syntopicon II: Man, Mathematics, Matter, Mechanics, Medicine, Memory and Imagination, Metaphysics, Mind, Monarchy, Nature, Necessity and Contingency, Oligarchy, One and Many, Opinion, Opposition, Philosophy, Physics, Pleasure and Pain, Poetry, Principle, Progress, Prophecy, Prudence, Punishment, Quality, Quantity, Reasoning, Relation, Religion, Revolution, Rhetoric, Same and Other, Science, Sense, Sign and Symbol, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, State, Temperance, Theology, Time, Truth, Tyranny, Universal and Particular, Virtue and Vice, War and Peace, Wealth, Will, Wisdom, and World
Volume 4
Homer (rendered into English prose by Samuel Butler)
Volume 5
Aeschylus (translated into English verse by G.M. Cookson)
Sophocles (translated into English prose by Sir Richard C. Jebb)
Euripides (translated into English prose by Edward P. Coleridge)
Aristophanes (translated into English verse by Benjamin Bickley Rogers)
Volume
The History (translated by George Rawlinson)
History of the Peloponnesian War (translated by Richard Crawley and revised by R. Feetham)
Volume 7
Volume 8
Volume 9
Volume 10
Works
On the Natural Faculties
Volume 11
The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements
On Conoids and Spheroids
On the Equilibrium of Planes
On Floating Bodies
Volume 12
On the Nature of Things (translated by H.A.J. Munro)
The Discourses (translated by George Long)
The Meditations (translated by George Long)
Volume 13
Volume 14
The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (translated by John Dryden)
Volume 15
P. Cornelius Tacitus (translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb)
Volume 16
Almagest, (translated by R. Catesby Taliaferro)
On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (translated by Charles Glenn Wallis)
Johannes Kepler (translated by Charles Glenn Wallis)
Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (Books IV–V)
The Harmonies of the World (Book V)
Volume 17
The Six Enneads (translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page)
Volume 18
Volume 19
Summa Theologica (First part complete, selections from second part, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province and revised by Daniel J. Sullivan)
Volume 20
Summa Theologica (Selections from second and third parts and supplement, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province and revised by Daniel J. Sullivan)
Volume 21
Divine Comedy (Translated by Charles Eliot Norton)
Volume 22
Volume 23
Volume 24
Volume 25[edit]
Volume 26
Volume 27
Volume 28
On the Circulation of Blood
On the Generation of Animals
Volume 29
Volume 30
Volume 31
Volume 32
English Minor Poems
Volume 33
Scientific and mathematical essays
Volume 34
Volume 35
Volume 36
Volume 37
Volume 38
A Discourse on Political Economy
Volume 39
Volume 40
Volume 41
Volume 42
Excerpts from The Metaphysics of Morals
Preface and Introduction to the Metaphysical Elements of Ethics with a note on Conscience
General Introduction to the Metaphysic of Morals
The Science of Right
Volume 43
American State Papers
Volume 44
Volume 45
Analytical Theory of Heat
Experimental Researches in Electricity
Volume 46
Volume 47
Volume 48
Volume 49
Volume 50
Volume 51
Volume 52
Volume 53
Volume 54
The Origin and Development of Psycho-Analysis
Selected Papers on Hysteria
The Sexual Enlightenment of Children
The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy
Observations on "Wild" Psycho-Analysis
Instincts and Their Vicissitudes
Repression
The Unconscious
Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety
New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
Course 3: MODERN FICTION
*Whatever I want* while incorporating underrepresented groups’ literary canons
COURSE 4: MODERN NON-FICTION
*Whatever I want* while incorporating underrepresented groups’ literary canon
COURSE 5: MYSTICISM
Reading list from the back of Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy
COURSE 6: SPACE & PLACE
From Columbia University, Department of Religion’s “Zones of Inquiry: Space” Reading List, which, might I point out, aptly contains a sub-section called “Pilgrimage”:
Classical iterations and general or programmatic statements
Homi Bhabha, Locations of Culture
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice
Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane.
Ed Casey, Getting back into place
Michel de Certeau. Practice of Everyday Life Vol 1.
Bernard Faure. 1987a. "Space and Place in Chinese Religious Traditions."
History of Religions 26, 4: 337-356.
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity
J.Z. Smith, To Take Place
Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. Oxford: Blackwell. (SYLL)
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Space” and “The Spatiality of One’s Body.” In Phenomenology of Perception.
Built spaces, architecture and environs
Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. Archabbey Publications, St. Vincent's Abbey, Latrobe PA, 1951, 200.
Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens
David Jaspers, The Sacred Desert
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York
Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral (1962)
Mark Taylor, Disfiguring Robert Venturi, Learning from Las Vegas
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space.
Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism” in Discipline and Punish
Nationalism and the Construction of Space
Talal Asad, “Religion, Nation State, Secularism” in Formations of the Secular
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 1983.
Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
Peter van der Veer and Lehmann, eds, Nation and Religion
Ramaswamy, Sumathi. Goddness and the Nation: Mapping Mother India
Globalization and transnationalisms
Arjun Appadurai, Globalization
Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250- 1350
William MacNeill, Plagues and People
Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane, “Transnational Relations and World Politics,” International Organization 1971.
Sassen, Saskia. Globalization and its Discontents
Manuel Vasquez and Marie Marquardht, Globalizing the Sacred: Religion Across the Americas
Pilgrimage
Ann Feldhaus, Connected Places: Religion, Pilgrimage, and Geographical Imagination in India (Palgrave 2003).
Haberman, David Journey through the Twelve Forests: An Encounter with Krishna (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
Gold, Ann Grodznis Fruitful Journeys: The Ways of Rajasthani Pilgrims (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
Victor Turner, “The Center out There: Pilgrim’s Goal” History of Religions 1973.
Contested places, Made Places, Vanishing places
Marc Augue, Non-places
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia.
Renato Rosaldo, “Ideology, Place and People without Culture,” Cultural Anthropology 1988.
Ramaswamy, Lost Land of Lemuria
Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan
Shepardson, Christine. Controlling Contested Spaces
Van der Veer, Peter. “Somnath and Ayodhya: Eternal Shrines, Contested Histories.” (SYLL)
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuite
Herzfeld, Michael. A Place in History: Social Monumental Time in a Cretan Town
Diaspora, migration and diffusion
R Bulliett, Conversion to Islam in the medieval period: an essay in quantitative history
Bulliet, Richard W. Islam: The View from the Edge
Kong, L. Mapping `new' geographies of religion: politics and poetics in modernity Progress in Human Geography. Thomas Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling
Stephen Vertovec, “Religion and Diaspora”
Khachig Tololyan, “The Nation State and its Others: In Lieu of a Preface,”
Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1991.
Green, Nile. Making Space
Markovits, Claude and Pouchepadass. Society and Circulation: Mobile and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia, 1750-1950
Nature and the “natural environment”
Catherine Albanese, Nature Religion in America
William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness”
Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, Harvard University Press (1995)
Mitchell, WJT. Landscape and Power
Cosgrove, Denis. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape
Spatial imaginaries, social imaginaries, and method
Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds. Culture, Power and Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology.
Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society.
Thomas Gieryn, “Three Truth Spots,” and “A Space for Place in Sociology”
Kerwin Lee Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890-1990.
Edward Said, Orientalism.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.”
Foucault, Michel. “Stultifera Navis”in Madness and Civilization)
Conclusion
I recognize that this is a daunting task. I’m of the belief that an ill-informed life, however, is more daunting still.
I hope to finish Sacred Books of The East first, by 2035. I’ll then tackle the West, and if still holding it (or still alive at that!) will move on to the Mysticism & Space / Place courses.
You can follow my progress as I post my current reading week by week, here.
