in brief
The thing with setting a goal – say, of posting every day when one has gotten out of the habit – is that the structure takes on a life of its own. It makes demands. It imposes itself. Sometimes it becomes an imposition, and one can only stand so many pairs of photographs and quotations in a row before one feels that one is perhaps keeping to the letter and not the spirit of the law.
It’s the same with the reading projects. Encountering a mention of Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief in Wittgenstein’s private notebook, I thought of picking up my copy, but then consulted my spreadsheet 1 of the works of Tolstoy arranged more or less chronologically to see when it would crop up. I found that it was still a ways down the list, well below War and Peace, which is still waiting on my getting through a history of the Napoleonic Wars (now that I’ve read a bit about Lithuania and Poland and am working on the Holy Roman Empire). 2 I could read it out of order and then reread it at the appropriate point in the spreadsheet, but although in the spirit of the game, that seems somehow to break the rules.
Hopefully I will still be interested (and remember Wittgenstein’s interest) when I finally get around to taking the book from the shelf.
- My penance for acquiring a small set of the translations by the Maudes (et al.) with money that should probably have been spent on housewares; but books furnish the mind as well as the room, so it was probably the proper choice.[↩]
- It is perhaps silly to worry about history when reading historical novels, as they should not, ideally, be intricate puzzles quizzing the reader’s historical knowledge, and yet…[↩]