Tag: systematic thinking

This entry is part of a series, Pont-consciousness» I was sitting on the throne a few minutes ago, reading Hannah Arendt’s Vita Activa, specifically the part called “The Location of Human Activities” and, as I was reading, I realized no one suggests to students how to converse with a book while they are reading it. We “receive” the information, highlight what we think is important (which I suppose is analogous to culling the herd) and re-read what we do not understand. But there is another way to read a book, and that is by allowing other texts we have read to intrude, to interrupt the text at hand, to gather the force of our past readings, and to hold a conversation with the work before us. This is somewhat how Coleridge read, his mind leaping between texts, and thoughts, and contexts–reading as a sort of extroverted comedy of manners. I [...]