Hey, I had another weekend in which I had an hour to kill at St Lucia, so it's into the UQ library and up to the 4th floor to look at their (very comprehensive) collection of books on religion and stuff to try to pick out something interesting and get as much out of it as I can in 50 minutes. (I have to allow for walking to and from my car.)
I am finding this an inordinately fun thing to do, probably because it has reminded me of the serendipity of browsing a library which I enjoyed as a young man, before the internet arrived. (You can stumble across things on the net, of course, but the more evolved it has become, the more it seems the serendipity has been drained out by too many people - or companies - thinking they know what I might find interesting.)
This week's choice was a very esoteric one - a translation of a book written in the early 20th century by the Japanese Zen Buddhism populariser DT Suzuki on the European mystic oddball Emanuel Swedenborg! (Title - "Swedenborg - Buddha of the North".)
And yet I found stuff in it that was interesting and about which I want to post.
A detailed post is coming.
2 comments:
Google purposely screws with its alogarithms to control human thought. They ought to be nationalised. Its like inviting a rabbi into your living room.
Yes, and not just for information, but also for physical goods. To search for something online requires that you have some definable idea of what you want, whereas physical space - in libraries, shops, even streetscapes - allows the possibility of random discovery.
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