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Anybody remember a time when you read a book and it had a big effect on you. A transformation. A significant change.
Back in 1988, i was on the ninth floor of WVU’s old Library, and it was late at night, and i was all alone on the ninth floor. I think it was a Friday night. And i remember coming across “The Culture of Terrorism” – an old Chomsky book.
And i read it for a coupla hours, and it kinda cracked up or cracked open my mind. It was like when you dial in the numbers on a combination lock and that last number lines up and there’s a “click”. My brain went “click”. Things were never the same after that. Newsweek and Time never seemed the same after that. I was no longer a mainstreamer politically. I didnt know much but I knew somethin had changed and i couldnt go back to Time/Newsweek/Face-The-Nation world.
Anybody remember a time when you read a book and it had a big effect on you. A transformation. A significant change.
Back in 1988, i was on the ninth floor of WVU’s old Library, and it was late at night, and i was all alone on the ninth floor. I think it was a Friday night. And i remember coming across “The Culture of Terrorism” – an old Chomsky book.
And i read it for a coupla hours, and it kinda cracked up or cracked open my mind. It was like when you dial in the numbers on a combination lock and that last number lines up and there’s a “click”. My brain went “click”. Things were never the same after that. Newsweek and Time never seemed the same after that. I was no longer a mainstreamer politically. I didnt know much but I knew somethin had changed and i couldnt go back to Time/Newsweek/Face-The-Nation world.James Joyce would have called that an “epiphany.”
I think I’ve probably had too many of those moments for my own good.
May have the dates wrong for this one, but reading Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces, followed by Robert Graves’ Greek Myths — those were the first profound reading experiences I can recall. I think I was 9 or 10. Weird, but it wasn’t that far removed from becoming a Rams’ fan.
I could never look at Christianity, god, gods, religion the same again. It shattered all those things for me. The biggest, brightest light came on . . . that if there were thousands of different gods and goddesses, and thousands of varieties of belief through the millennia, all across the world . . . how could there be any thing like “the one true god”?
Fast forward to a much later epiphany: Reading William Barrett’s Irrational Man. Perhaps the best single intro to Existentialism ever written. Nothing was the same after that, either. I think that was 1983.
A lot of mini-epiphanies since that time, with some launching many others.
Most recently reread a book that did that, but in an odd sort of way: George Scialabba’s awesome What Are Intellectuals Good For? It’s odd because it’s a collection of essays and reviews (primarily) about intellectuals who caused some of those mini-epiphanies in the past, or would have caused them if I had know about them before. Rereading the book made me want to chase them down all over again, or for the first time. A great collection for leftists, especially.
Anybody remember a time when you read a book and it had a big effect on you. A transformation. A significant change.
Back in 1988, i was on the ninth floor of WVU’s old Library, and it was late at night, and i was all alone on the ninth floor. I think it was a Friday night. And i remember coming across “The Culture of Terrorism” – an old Chomsky book.
And i read it for a coupla hours, and it kinda cracked up or cracked open my mind. It was like when you dial in the numbers on a combination lock and that last number lines up and there’s a “click”. My brain went “click”. Things were never the same after that. Newsweek and Time never seemed the same after that. I was no longer a mainstreamer politically. I didnt know much but I knew somethin had changed and i couldnt go back to Time/Newsweek/Face-The-Nation world.I have never had one big “snap” moment, reading or otherwise. It’s always, for me, a slow process of little things that finally add up. Reading has always been influential for me but as I said there’s always just this long series of “add ups” that add up. No shining moment of pure reconfiguration.
Probably the most influential book I have ever encountered was influential because I was very young when I read it–a teenager. I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X and from that I sensed 2 things at the same time. First, I found myself sympathetic with and understanding someone whose life, ostensibly, could not be more different from my own, and that includes his interest in religion, which I simply did not share. But I could respect and be interested in that all the same. Second, I noticed that this sense of sympathetic identification with someone who was THAT different was not the social and cultural norm–I saw that he was, in the mainstream, reviled and feared. Back then, remember, Malcolm X was not the cultural figure he is today–nowadays, he is much more accepted…there’s a movie and everything. Back then, he was basically public enemy #1. So I could learn from and respect a life that different from mine, yet see that the dominant mainstream opinion of him was so full of fear and hate and uncomprehending.
That was one thing, but it was more of a process and not this sudden “click” like you describe.
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