Be a Rebel.
Read a Chapter Book over ten years.
Read a Nonfiction Book in the same amount of time.
Read a poem, essay or a short story once or twice a month.
Read a life by Plutarch or Suetonius once a year.
Catch up on your mythology and fairy tales once or twice a year, too.
Read a random Encyclopedia or Dictionary Entry once or twice in a while.
Read a chapter of the Bible now and again.
Read an Epic Poem over a lifetime.
Just read... don't be afraid. It's not a contest.
The Bible More than Every Other Book, Probably Even Twice Combined
War and Peace Leo Tolstoy Twice
Anna Karenina By Leo Tolstoy Once
The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway Twice
Steinbeck The Pearl Once
F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby Four Times
The Communist Manifesto Three Times
Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice Once
Jane Austen Mansfield Park Once
Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy Once
Machiavelli's Prince Once
True Believer Eric Hoffer Once
Frank Herbert Dune Trilogy Once
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Alexander Solzhenitsyn Once
Fredrick Douglass The Life of Frederick Douglass Once
Lois Lowry's The Giver Once
C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity Once
C. S. Lewis The Abolition of Man Three Times
C. S. Lewis The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe Once
C. S. Lewis The Magician's Nephew Once
C. S. Lewis That Hideous Strength Once
C. S. Lewis Perelandra Once
C. S. Lewis Out of the Silent Planet Once
C. S. Lewis Dymer Once
1494 By Stephen R. Brown
Ray Bradbury Dandelion Wine Once
Ray Bradbury The Martian Chronicles Once
Ray Bradbury The Illustrated Man Once
Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 four times
Macbeth By Shakespeare Once
Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare Once
How to Win Friends and Influence People Dale Carnegie Twice
Julius Caesar by Shakespeare Once
Shakespearean Sonnets Once
Aristotle's Poetics Twice
The United States Constitution Five Times
United Nations Human Rights Charter Once
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll Once
The Art of War by Sun Tzu Once
Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Once
George Orwell's 1984 Three Fourths
Brave New World Once
The Complete Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock T. S. Eliot
Sir Thomas More's Utopia Once
The Catcher in the Rye Three Fourths
Civil Disobedience By Thoreau once
Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird Four Times
Conquistador by Buddy Levy Once
The Case for Christmas Lee Strobel Twice
The Case for Easter Lee Strobel Twice
J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit Once
J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fall of Arthur Twice
John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress Once
Before and After Socrates by F. M. Cornford Once
St. Augustine's Confessions Once
Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn Once
Voltaire's Candide Once
Seamus Heaney's Translation of Beowulf Once
Paradise Lost Once
George Orwell's Why I Write Twice
The Everlasting Man G. K. Chesterton Once
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Once
Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift Once
Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy Once
Animal Farm George Orwell Once
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Once
The Lotus Caves John Christopher Once
Complete Sayings of Ptahhotep - Thrice
Two Poems by Thomas Gray
Discourse on the Method by Descartes - Once
Boethius' Consolations of Philosophy - Once
Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - Once
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens - Once
40 Poems by Wordsworth
1. Lines Written in an Album
Flowers for Algernon Daniel Keyes - Once
The Child of the Cavern Jules Verne - Once
40 Poems by Wendell Berry
1 Essay by Wendell Berry
8 Poems by Robert Frost
30 Poems by Coleridge
1. Meditation on a Cataract
2. Religious Musings on Christmas Eve
20 Poems by Yeats
20 Poems by Keats
1. Hyperion
2. The Fall of Hyperion
60 Poems by Walt Whitman
30 Poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
15 Poems by Seamus Heaney
20 Poems by Horace
1. icci beatis
3 Short Stories by James Joyce
1 Short Story by Herman Melville
1 Short Story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
9 Full Canterbury Tales
Rousseau's First Discourse
60 Irish Poems and Fairy Tales by Various Authors
1. Babylon
2. The Burial of King Cormac
3. The Lament of Queen Maeve
4. The Banshee
5. The Children of Lir (Poem and Short Story)
6. The Bells of Shandon
7. Lament of Poets 1916
8. The Exodus
9. The Famine Year
10. To Inishkea
11. To Maeve
12. The Herb Leech
13. Go Ploughman Plough
5 Complete Plutarch's Lives
8 T. S. Eliot Poems
5 Robert Southey Poems
5 Meditations in the Tao Te Ching
10 Byron Poems
1. Prometheus
4 Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe
3 Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
1 Life by Suetonius (Nero)
65 Grimm's Fairy Tales
22 Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales
4 Essays by Frédéric Bastiat
6 Essays by Sigmund Freud
2 Essays by Carl Jung
3 Dialogues of Plato
5 Short Stories from Great American Short Stories
30 Poems from A Treasury of Poems in the English Language
2 Short Stories by Charles Beaumont
30 Great Tales from Great Tales From English History by Robert Lacey
1 Essay by Benjamin Franklin
15 Poems by John Donne
Thomas Paine's Letter to Quakers
4 Short Stories by Guy De Maupassant
22 Essays from Michael Montaigne
50 Aesop's Fables
20 of the Most Influential Speeches
Washington's Farewell Address
Washington's Inaugural Speeches
Jefferson's Farewell Speech
The Declaration of Independence
6 Books of the Old Testament Apocrypha
12 Books of the New Testament Apocrypha
12 Poems by Wallace Stevens
3 Stories in The True Fairyland of Old King Cole
10 Poems by Emily Dickinson
1. I Gave Myself to Him
1 Essay by Francis Bacon
12 Irish Legends
4 Welsh Legends
Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vaunaghut
Many Egyptian Fables and Stories from its Mythology
20 Letters from the Founding Fathers
3 Poems by William Blake
1. A Prophecy of America
12 Eddas from the Elder Edda
Athanasian Creed 20xs
Apostles Creed 1000xs
Nicene Creed 300xs
*If A Poem is Set Aside and Numbered, It's One I Recurrently Read
Books I'm in the Process of Reading
Virgil's Aeneid
Ovid's Metamorphosis
Homer's Odyssey
Spencer's Fairy Queen
Mozi's Meditations
Confucian Analects
La Rochefouchauld's Maxims and Essays
Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays and Poems
Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe
Philip K. Dick 20 Short Stories
J. R. R. Tolkien's Silmarillion
Goethe's Faust
The Tale of Genjii Lady Murasaki
Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper
Caxton's Le Morte De Arthur
The Sayings of Mencius
The Romantic's Manifesto by Ayn Rand
Anthem by Ayn Rand
Dante's Inferno
Herodotus
Adam Smith's the Wealth of Nations
The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica
Thomas Hobbes Leviathan
John Locke's Two Essays
The Federalist Papers
The Antifederalist Papers
The Complete Pythagoras
Globish by Robert McCrum
Fernand Braudel's A History of Civilization
For Whom the Bell Tolls Earnest Hemmingway
Brother's Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Writings of Martin Luther
Being Logical D. Q. McInery
On Tyranny Timothy Snyder
Edith Hamilton's Mythology
Thomas Bulfinch's Mythology
Memoires of Chateaubriand
Emma Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility Jane Austen
The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck
Child Harold's Pilgrimage Byron
Michelangelo by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Horse and His Boy C. S. Lewis
Paper Towns by John Greene
Lucretius' On the Nature of Things
The City of God
Leibniz' Theodicy (One Snippet on Asymptotes Helped Me Completely Understand Calculus)
Compendiums I Refer To Often
Constitutional Law Casebook Fourteenth Edition
Oxford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetic Terms
A New Handbook on Literary Terms - David Mikics
Encarta Encyclopedia 2004
Euclid's Elements from Green Lion Press
Evidence that Demands a Verdict - The McDowells
2 Western History Textbooks from the 1980s and 2010s
Rules for Writers by Diana Hacker
A Reader's Digest of North American Birdlife
A Reader's Digest of North American Wildlife
Bulfinch and Edith Hamilton's Mythologies
Mythology A - Z Annette Giesecke
Myths and Legends by William Doty and Jake Jackson
1978 Lutheran Hymnal
Barnes and Noble's Illuminated Book Edition The Constitution and Other Selected Writings of the Founding Fathers
Matthew Henry Commentary
World Mythology in Bite Sized Chunks by Mark Daniels
The Little Book of Mathematical Principles, Theories and Things by Robert Solomon
Mathematics by Michael Willers
Scripture Translations I'm Familiar With
Dead Sea Scrolls Translated Into English
2 Hebrew Transliterations
1 Greek Transliteration
KJV
NASB
NRSV
NKJV
NIV
ESV
JPS
GNT
TEV New Testament
Writings of the Apostolic Fathers, J. B, Lightfoot
Old Testament Apocrypha, NRSV
Strong's New and Old Testament Concordances
Children's Books I Read When In School
Iceberg Hermit Arthur J. Roth
Island of the Blue Dolphins Scott O'Dell
My Side of the Mountain Jean Craighead George
The Hatchet Gary Paulson
The Cay Theodore Taylor
Wacky Wednesday Dr. Seuss
Go Dog Go Dr. Seuss
The Foot Book Dr. Seuss
Green Eggs and Ham Dr. Seuss
The Best Nest Dr. Seuss
The Cat in the Hat Dr. Seuss
One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish Dr. Seuss
Monsters Come in Many Colors Jim Henderson and Jocelyn Stevenson
Meet the Care Bears Ali Reich
Kids Fun Filled Question and Answer Book Jane Parker Resnick
The Beginner's Bible: Timeless Stories Karen Henley and Dennas Davis
Mother Goose's Nursery Rhymes
Killer Angels Michael Shaara
Tuck Everlasting Natalie Babbitt
The BFG Roald Dahl
James and the Giant Peach Roald Dahl
A Comprehensive Photo Book on Gettysburg
American Tall Tales Mary Pope Osborne
The Little Engine that Could Watty Piper
Charlotte's Web E. B. White
Category: Analysis
On Buddhist Ignorance and Literature
I personally think no knowledge can be gained by understanding yourself. That’s a very Buddhist thought you’re entertaining. To the Buddhist, any claim to knowledge is what they’d call “Ignorance.”
Personally, I think literature is grounded in forces outside of itself, and shows existential causes and effects that can be related to what we see and observe today. It’s meant to show and forecast the effects of certain actions, and whether the effects are just or unjust.
Of Symbol and Allegory
So, it may come to a surprise that Tolkien hated Allegory. And one may consider his Lord of the Rings is an Allegory, but it is not.
This gets to the subject of today's essay, of what is the significant difference between Symbol and Allegory? I will try to explain as best I can the difference, not in Tolkien's view, but in my own.
To me, Symbol is Symbol. It is not concrete, but rather abstract. It doesn't point to something in the literal world, where we can say, "This means this," but rather it strikes at an archetype and a form. A good example is that Tolkien's Orc Army is not literally the Raping Huns--though that's what he fought in World War I--but rather, a symbol, and aesthetic representation of evil. I almost said allegory--as I don't differentiate between the two, though maybe I ought.
But, should I cut between them, and read The Lord of the Rings, Sauron is not an allegorical representation of Hitler. Neither is the Ring an allegorical representation of power. Rather, Sauron is a symbol for Power-lust, and the ring a symbol of the instrument which coerces entire nations to go to war and destroy.
As, the Lord of the Rings the central conflict is Green versus Black. It is Lush versus Waste. It is Nature versus Industrialism. But even then... it becomes allegorical when it represents industrialism. Rather, the form nature ought to take, to shape our technologies around conforming them to be one with nature, that is what fights against the coercive powers of lust and greed and hate.
No allegory. Tolkien's Orcs do not represent Asian or Black foes, coming across and destroying the Western World. Quite the opposite, it represents oppression coming across the valleys, making No Man's Land--which Tolkien witnessed first hand and scarred him deeply--and taking the might of industry, and stripping away entire landscapes for minerals, and destroying the Earth through combat.
Tolkien's work is a metaphor, but not an Allegory. Tolkien's themes are symbols, but not Allegorical representations of things in the world, but rather universal truths that reach across all time and space. It is not "Spice" in Dune, that we know it means oil. Rather, it is self contained within its own universe, and within its own tautological makeup, where it perfectly fits in the world, without reaching into this one. It is separate, but still, evil is understood to be evil, and good good. And in this separate existence, in the Lord of the Rings, we see human behavior, we see parallels to our own world, but not outright allegories. Symbols, but not Allegories.
A symbol is more rooted in the form, while an allegory is more rooted in the existential. A symbol exists in the imagination, an allegory exists in the real world. A symbol has no racial, cultural or ethnic specified, but transcends it, while the Allegory pokes at a thing which we can all say, "This is what it represents."
Nothing in Tolkien's world represents anything. It rather is what it is, and symbolizes the real power structures and struggles in the real world. Independent of the things in our world, but rather exist in his world unattached and unrelated. As they mimeses, but they do not mimic.
Why Rome Fell
Rome fell for a number of reasons, [homosexuality] being one of them. I wouldn't say it's the cause of the fall, but it's definitely a correlation. Probably, you can read in Horace that women were getting promiscuous, and that's usually the first sign toward social failure, which Rome's was a long winding spiral downhill for about three hundred years, ever since Augustus. Like, under Tiberius they literally crucified God, and put a Pear Tree on Trial. And in the time of Horace, we see the women are beginning to be predatory, and are starting to not have fidelity, which that stirs up a lot of problems in a culture. Probably that's the root cause of why societies fall, is men lose faith in women and the fidelity of marriage as a binding social contract, and begin to be androgynous as a result. And that leads to weak ethics, and men who can't bear the weight of society, so another society comes and conquers them.
A Discourse on Logic in Interpreting
One who studies mathematics--even a cursory understanding--might see a bunch of numbers, and think that is doing math. Well, it is not. It is simply a system that gets you to a number, which you use to help put into something, that you took from different measurements.
However, there's linear math, exponentiated math, and even calculus math. And with a human being, they may wonder to themselves why a thing may seem to contradict. Well, the simple answer, is that there can sometimes be two answers. There's also things, that to find the right answer, it has to be assumed rather than touched--such as a limit with calculus.
So, if you do a quadratic equation, it may turn out that there are two answers--a length and width--where one is negative, and the other is positive. Certainly, this has a function in mathematics. It may also occur, that there's an imaginary number--something like fiction, where we alter the real world, and its laws, to produce what are also true answers.
So, if you study calculus, you realize that every time you solve a calculus equation, you are making an assumption about the answer. It is a true answer--based on the proportions of how the ratios work--but it's assumed, because one cannot actually complete the ratios, and thereby touch the limit. Many things in life are like this, that they have to be assumed, and reached by systems of logic that take leaps out of the absurd and into the obvious.
So with that, not all things are linear. And our linear minds like to describe things, by thinking something only is so, if it goes one of two directions. Whereby, if logic is a system of principles applied to language, then the basis of that language is reality, which we piece together to form new and useful conclusions. This logic can be linear, quadratic or even calculative. It's a matter of necessity that we understand this.
Logic Explained Through Violets
Tautology is A=>A. If it’s the color violet, it’s violet.
If it’s a violet flower, it is the color violet. A=>B.
If it's not the color violet, it’s not a violet flower. That’s modus tollens.
If it is a violet flower, then it is that color. That’s modus ponen.
Violet is violet. Tautology. A=>A
Violet flowers are violet. A=>B
It'd also be equivocation to state the Color is the Flower.
Not all violets are violet; or some violets are blue, makes the statement categorical.
Therefore, "Violets are violet" becomes an inductive argument, because it's based on the probability of a violet being violet.
"Violets aren't blue," and abductive argument would hypothesize said speaker probably never has seen a blue violet, or lives in a continent outside of the United States, or outside of the Eastern part of it, or doesn't know such a flower exists.
The poet, though, relates violet as being blue, like the poet relates a rainbow as being purple, either through etymological or lyrical depth: the poem originates in England, so the word is being used in a poetic shade of meaning, and not related to the Blue Violet found in the Eastern United States. And this is how creative writing works.
Thoughts on Tolkien’s Orcs
I don't think the Orcs are Asians or Africans. I think they're raping Huns. So Germans. Middle Earth is an emblem about World War I and emblemizes the implementation of Industrialization on the West. I don't think Tolkien was thinking about the Japanese or Chinese or any of them, except in the instance of the atrocious war crimes they committed. Which, an enemy capable of doing that, that's in Hebrew Literature, that they are worthless. That's in the Bible, but only because those cultures are irredeemable.
I mean, sure in the Fall of Arthur, Arthur is campaigning in the East, but that leads to Mordred taking control of the country, and then ends up defeating Arthur at Camlann. So, the exact opposite, Tolkien was very aware of the danger of having a major campaign against the East.
No, Tolkien hated allegory. They just represent what Tolkien saw on the battlefield, which would be the Huns in World War I. Just evil in its purest sense. And also the corrosive and corruptive power of industrialization and authoritarianism.
On Poetry’s Interpretation
{...}Poetry involves a lot of nuance, and it involves a lot of attention to meaning. A good poem has multiplicity of meanings, that converge in many forms of communication. But, generally, poetry is an expression of the deepest thought.
There’s several layers of Poetic nuance.
Historical: What the Poem means at its Time Period.
Allegorical: What the Poem means by Metaphorical and Literary Language.
Logocentric: What the Poem means as a Universal Expression of Truth.
And finally:
Typological: What the Poem means in its context and application to Psychological and Sociological truth.
And of course those things overlap. But I’d say being able to both communicate and understand a poem in those layers of meaning, are what makes a good reader, writer and listener.
Forms of Intelligence
The forms of intelligence, goes:
Reactive: It reacts to things, based on sensory input.
Associative: It recognizes other organisms, and can socialize with them.
Supra-Association: It not only recognizes other organisms, but can communicate with them in albeit primitive ways.
Personal: It recognizes itself as a personal entity.
Existential: It recognizes its own mortality.
Humor: It can have a sense of humor.
It possesses Cathexis: It has creative capacity.
Reason: Only men have this, but it can do complex things like algebra, or read and write.
Communal: It recognizes the needs of others above itself, and it can understand the otherness of a community, and has sacrificial ability to serve others before its own need.
Logocentric: It can properly identify the reality and substance of nature, and rather than be a product of will, it can understand a thing as it actually is, or even as it ought, as opposed to merely willing it to be. As most people understand the world as they will it, not as it actually is.
Prophetic: The ability to reconcile events, and predict future outcomes by assessing their natures in reality, and then forming correct conclusions based on such.
Above that you’re dealing with Angels and Demons and supernatural creatures. But, that’s the form of animal and human intelligence, as a scale.
IQ doesn’t fit on that scale, as someone with a low IQ could possess higher forms of intelligence.
Native Cave Paintings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDu2rUoT2NM Zelinka, Peter. Mysterious Pictographs of the Southwest. YouTube.com, 2021. Web. The Human Imagination is priceless. It has great potentials for creativity. And even at this early stage in history, it could get very surreal. How ever much this is true, there's still common archetypes in these cave drawings. Giants. Bug creatures. Pinocchios---just humans with elongated noses. The murals were made around 1300AD, from what I understand. Which, at that time, the religions of the Americas had a lot of strange looking figures in it. You can see the Aztec gods and goddesses are very strange. These are no different. However, they might mean something different, which I'll get into. Very interesting stuff. Human imaginations at work... So, draw from the imagery common themes in human imagination. The sideways mouth of the giant 3:56 is something I myself have imagined. It's just something that turns up independently in my daily musings. I don't know why. But, there's also a common mythology of a World Tree in both Mayan and Norse cultures, which could have no contact with each other whatsoever. Why do they both have a world tree? I don't know. But, I think certain patterns of subconscious bring those ideas out, because only so much is possible for us to imagine. As great as this is, there's certain limitations on what we can draw, or represent with images. My favorite image is the negative space where there's a woman 6:04 underneath the armpit of the owl creature. She even gets formed into a body. This is some Grade A art. Definitely among the best I've seen, even for today's standards. Some other universal images are the Broad Shoulders of the Chiefs. 8:30. When we think of authority, we think of broad shoulders. You have to understand, also, that some of these images utilize negative space to complete the images. I'm looking at one right now, where I can see it's a man and woman, just by the negative space and what's not there. I can see the hair of the woman becoming more defined in the negative space of the image. I can even see faces cleft out of the rock, defined by some of the lines of the paintings (whether by natural erosion, or intentional, I don't know). Very beautiful. A testament to the human Imagination, and the Logos at work. It's just the possibilities. As much as is here, I don't really see anything new. You know what I mean? There's just a lot of common archetype and symbology and even though some of it is disturbing---the Shadow in all of us is disturbing---what is depicted here is a battle between the light and the dark. Twisted and enigmatic figures are overcome by nature. I think that's the meaning of this, too. It's a fight between subconscious fears and the peace and harmony of the natural and real world. In all estimations, it's a lot like my mythology of Fairyland. A battle between subconscious demons in all their grossness, (Judge not lest you be judged; and remove the log in your own eye before you see to remove the mote from another) and the real, natural and beautiful world.
B. K. Neifert 