Book reviews, week 45 (with AI co created art work)
Sotirios Makrygiannis
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The Romance of an Old Fool
Mr John is 48 years old; he visits his homeland and gets attracted by a 22-year-old girl named Phyllis.
Did he get attracted to her because of her youth? Because she was the orphaned child of his first love? Because of his biological need to get married and become a father? We are still determining the more profound reason. One could assume that she reminded him of his first love feelings. That could be a powerful enough reason. Indeed we cannot say that Mr John was the kind of man running behind young girls. He was naturally very aristocratic and snobbish at times but, above all, a Philosopher as he claimed to be.
What about the girl? Why did she give in to his flirting? Was his money the reason? The prestige? Indeed not his good looks. My explanation is Sapiosexuality.
The first use of the word dates back to 2004 and originated from the Latin root word 'Sapien,' which means wise, and 'sexualis,' which means sexual.
Sapiosexuality is a type of sexuality that involves being more attracted by the contents of a person's mind than by the appearance of their body. To feel sexually attracted to another person, a sapiosexual must first feel intellectually stimulated.
Because attraction is centred on the intellect or how a person's mind works, people who are sapiosexual do not feel attraction until their mind feels stimulated by a potential partner. There is no lust, liking, wanting, or sexual gratification unless the brain has been enabled on an intellectual level first.
Mr John's philosophical reasoning and endless talk about the nature of love by using Plato and other ancient Greeks could have been enough for the little girl to get aroused, first in the brain. There is a hidden benefit to knowing all those dead Greek philosophers...
The story develops nicely, Mr John's love becomes the joke of the town, but he couldn't care less about what others think about it. Love does that thing to man, so the character behaves within the insanity and irrationality limits of being in love.
The girl also at the end behaves according to the hormonal demands of a young girl, but I will not say more as it's a lovely book to read until the end. The bottom line is that Sapiosexuality is the book's main topic, and the "way" it works is described rather well.
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For Every Music Lover: A Series of Practical Essays on Music
An excellent informative book covers general music subjects from Mozart to Opera to why the Stravitarius violin is so good.
There were mistakes that a Greek could pick up. Dionysus comes second and not first on the origins of music, as the book describes. The proto-Greeks, the Arcadians, loved Pan (half goat-half man), a sexually active goat, I must admit. Pan is also the root of the word Panic that we use today.
He was a predecessor to Zeus' revolt and takeover from the Titans since he was living in Crete when Zeus was a child, hidden from his father Cronus (Time). Pan was a music lover, and most statues depict him with a flute playing, probably some mystic tune luring lovers. He is one of the Greek gods that die, but his "religion" continues with the Orphic mysteries and then comes the Dyodisian tradition.
Poets such as Simonides of Ceos said that Orpheus's music and singing could charm the birds, fish and wild beasts, coax the trees and rocks into dance and divert the course of rivers. That is the power of music, and somehow we have forgotten the full extent of the power that those sweet sound waves could cause when passing through our ears. Imagine that the Horns of Jericho were able to destroy walls according to the Jewish tradition, so there must be something there that, indeed, we forgot with the aeons, but that again is a subject for later review once I find a more relevant book.
With his Musica Universalis, Pythagoras established that the pitch of a musical note is inverse proportion to the length of the string that produces it and that intervals between harmonious sound frequencies form simple numerical ratios. Based on that theory, which was designed to explain the Cosmos with musical notes we have today, piano, the octaves, and to some extent, the metronome (from ancient Greek μέτρον (métron, "measure") and νομός (nomós, "custom", "melody"). The device produces an audible click or other sounds at a regular interval that the user can set, typically in beats per minute (BPM). The book does not cover history extensively; it starts 1000 later than Pythagoras.
Here, Germans and Italians took the lead after 1000 years had passed. Mozart and Bach are the most prominent musical geniuses this world has ever seen. All that, of course, was enabled by a single movement in Italy, the Camerata de' Bardi. They were a group of humanists, musicians, poets and intellectuals in late Renaissance Florence who gathered under the patronage of Count Giovanni de' Bardi (probably a distant relative of Bardi-logiannis? who knows, let's run a DNA test on it).
Giovanni de' Bardi, a lover of Greece, fought the Turks everywhere and, in the in-betweens, gave a rebirth to the Greek Chorus by creating the 1st opera: Dafne (Daphne (/ˈdæfni/; DAFF-nee; Greek: Δάφνη, Dáphnē, lit. 'laurel'). A minor figure in Greek mythology is a naiad, a variety of female nymph associated with fountains, wells, springs, streams, brooks and other bodies of freshwater.)
The book does not cover those root points as described above; it uses the Greek heritage as a footnote and focuses more on what happened after the rebirth of Greek Drama by Giovanni de' Bardi. Therefore I took the liberty to add the origins and correct a few mistakes.
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In Tune with the Infinite
Allegedly, Henry Ford, a pioneer of mass-produced automobiles, attributed his success directly to reading "In Tune with the Infinite." After reading the book, Ford ordered it in mass and distributed copies freely to high-profile industrialists. Why? Because of the intense spirituality, the strong Christianity messages or perhaps due to some fascinating points that he is making and will explain below.
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First, when it comes to Christianity, I needed help understanding what denomination his core belief is. From what I have seen on TV, the words used are what you see from those TV evangelists in the USA. God knows their core value system, or they sell Christ and his teachings by popularising them for a mass audience. In the end, I classified him closer to the Baháʼí Faith and the unity of humanity.
ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, founder of the religion", first travelled to Europe and America in 1911–1912; he gave public talks that articulated the basic principles of the Baháʼí Faith. These included preaching on the equality of men and women, race unity, the need for world peace, and other progressive ideas for the early 20th century. ʻAbbás (Persian: عباس), the Master, is a strong supporter of the unification of all religions, and here, the author that wrote the book around the same time preaches the same thing. Coincidence? Perhaps but the fact is new wave spirituality authors always reuse microtrends and the time of the publication and teachings of Abba in the USA do match. Nevertheless cannot verify the above as accurate; it is just a speculation.
The exciting part is related to the connection between thoughts and reality. We are studying so much the observed phenomena occurring in front of our eyes. Rarely, however, is the link between the ideas that we have at that moment and the phenomena observed. Prove me wrong and send me all the scientific papers that have the quantum experiment of the double slit as a starting point.
This end-to-end observation is missing from scientific reasoning. Here the author is trying to build an argument that thoughts are more powerful than we currently think. Our thoughts can make us sick, something that we tell, but we don't comprehend the extent of the actual power. It is accurate, and he is writing about it, that a negative thought can change the acidity of the saliva produced by our mouth. That part of the book was exciting to the point that reconfirmed my point of view that if we knew how powerful a thought is, we would never allow our brain again to make one.... then a negative thought came, and I said in silence: κυριε ιησου χριστε ελεησον με and my pulses came back to normal.
It is a good book no matter your faith; give it a try...
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The Seven Poor Travellers
The book's title reminded me of the Finnish classic Seitsemän veljestä (7 Brothers), so I took the time to investigate the publication dates. The seven Poor travellers were printed before the book by Aleksis Kivi. It felt a bit that Aleksis Kivi copied in a way Dickens in a process that we call today newsjacking.
Was the subject similar? In a way, yes, but the Finnish story is much bigger, much more profound than Dickens's. Dickens has this issue with Christmas, perhaps becouse around Christmas time, while he was a kid, the "banks' of the time would confiscate their house and let him and his family outside in the cold. That level of cruelty can also be read in Finnish history, and I felt that Aleksi Kivi felt very close to Dickens in personal and fictional stories, therefore the admiration to "copy" the title.
Both men died around the same time, sadly Aleksis at a younger age than Dickens, but something I felt connected those two great novelists, and I took a note to investigate the connection a bit more in the future.
Anyhow, beyond the obsession of Dickens with Christmas, this book is about enemies becoming friends, the act of forgiveness that liberates the soul. Don't get fooled by the title. Are six travellers. The 7th is the narrator, who joins the journey like a ghost (another of Dickens's favourite characters).
I must admit that I laughed out loud when he introduced the Double Dick character, so it's a bit funny story but deeply carries existential angst. The angst was created within Dickens from his early childhood story. From age 12, he had to work in child labour becouse of his father's debts, which seems to be the whole point; that experience looks like the primary pain that Dickens expresses in his books.
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The Problems of Philosophy
From where to start and what kind of ending could this review have? Philosophy, indeed, has many problems.
Let's start with the point that this book was written in 1912 and contained two words that fit very well with one of the problems of philosophy. The words are "augmented reality"; perhaps Russell is the first to use them to explain Plato's Cave and the interpretation of the world around us.
Artificial reality came to our vocabulary around the 1960s in a book by Myron W Krueger. He describes interactive, immersive environments in that the user interacts with them. Augmented reality came much later, in the 1980s are practical implementation and real-life concepts.
The fact that Plato and Russel introduced two words was trying to explain them using the time's vocabulary. Could it be possible that Plato "invented" augmented and artificial reality?
Plato thought that we are living in it, like the matrix movie b, but that will take a long time to explain, so let's park it for later. Russel tries to explain the theory of Forms in many chapters in this book by using all famous philosophical thinking from Hengel to Kant to Descartes. Still, it is all about Plato, and this is yet another footnote interpretation of Greek logic.
Try to decompose AR by applying these definitions: There is ἶδος (eidos), "visible form", and related terms μορφή (morphē), "shape", and φαινόμενα (phenomena), "appearances", from φαίνω (phainō), "shine". When you enter a Virtual World, you see pixels that create a visible form with a shape so they can appear and shine. I think somehow if we transfer Plato to the current day and put him in a virtual reality mask, he will try to explain it as stated above. The funny thing is that for Plato, the whole world is like that without a virtual cover; that is our technological interpretation and mimicking of his theory in reality.
One could ask. Do you mean the world around us is not real? Well, what is real? Is your own reality a universal one? Do we all see colours the same way? Do we all hear music in the same way? I guess not, but the feelings and the interpretation of "reality" as pain and emotion are pretty accurate to all of us. And somewhere here, Stoics come into play, another big subject I would rather avoid explaining for now because the "indifference" concept they introduce is partly harmful and partly liberating. Russell covers the part of universals rather well, and here you realise why Russell is so significant: he is a rationalist.
Let None But Geometers Enter Here, ἀγεωμέτρητος μὴ εἰσίτω, was written in the Plato Academy entrance. Imagine that the world around us consists of at least ten dimensions, 1 of time and nine space dimensions; some say that we could have up to 21, and the more we search, the more of them we find. I observe only a few of them (length, width, and height), so to define "real", one should explain with plain language the angles and the points of view from each dimension separately. That is impossible with language but could be possible with Geometry and mathematics. Again, with all the good intentions and effort that gave him a Nobel prize, Russell tried to do precisely that. Of course, his knowledge back in 1912 was limited; his logic contained only the state of matter: it is, or it doesn't. Schrödinger's Cat Experiment came later (a cat can be dead or alive at the same time); therefore, his rational, logical explanations fell short of covering scientific discoveries after the publication of his book. I probably covered them later, but since I have not read all of his books, I cannot be sure if he tried to convert Einstein's theory of relativity into philosophical interpretations. I'm sure that Russell is indeed a philosopher to be read, even if he adds footnotes to the Greek immortal ideas.
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