what to read in Alex

I could go with Antony and Cleopatra, since it’s hard not to get a kick out of reading it in Alexandria. I’ve done that before. And in fact, I’ll take it with me just in case.

I’d be tempted to go with Plotinus, who spent many years there and fits the spirit of the place to some extent, but it would feel phony since the Enneads were written down in Rome, not Alex. The other problem is that I don’t want to carry that massive complete volume of the Enneads with me. One effect of the Kindle (which I don’t yet own) will probably be to encourage more frequent vacation readings of books that no one wants to carry– Proust and Gibbon come to mind, but I’ll throw Plotinus in the same pot too.

Hey, I got it!… The more philosophical writings of Origen. I have them on my shelf but have barely read them. That’s as Alexandria as it gets. And honestly, I literally just thought of that idea while typing this post. A bolt from the blue.

That reminds me of something that would be an interesting survey question for academic types… Which book had the biggest impact on you? Not which one you think is the greatest, or which one you currently like the most. But which book was timed in such a way that it had the biggest influence on your future.

I’m speaking here of fortunate chance timing, books that had to be read precisely when they were in order to push you in a specific reason. That’s why I can’t choose Being and Time as my own award winner, because I made repeated efforts to read that book from ages 17-20, and if I had failed again at 20 I would have made it through at 21 or 22. There was simply no ay I was going to go very far into life without reading Being and Time. Nor would it have made a significant difference to my future whether I’d gotten into Heidegger at 18, 20, or 22. It was inevitably going to happen at some point.

In intellectual terms, my winner might be Levinas, Existence and Existents, the first work by Levinas that I read. It hit me at a formative moment when I must have felt the need for pro-Heidegger criticism of Heidegger, and I still think he’s the best we have in that category. I’m pretty sure that Levinas is going to wear well over the decades, though perhaps not for the reasons that his admirers often think.

In personal terms, it may well be Meillassoux’s After Finitude. If the book had been published 5 years later, or if I’d been told about it 5 years later, that would have made a huge difference for everyone in the s.r. orbit, since that orbit wouldn’t really have existed in tangible form.

I suppose people can be categorized in this way too. There are certain people who are simply our soul mates, and we would have been close to them no matter when we met up. But there are others where it may be all about critical timing– someone who hits you right at the exact moment when you were open to their specific sort of influence, and perhaps if it were earlier or later it would have meant less or even nothing to you.

ADDENDUM: Unfortunately, both Antony and Cleopatra and Origen seem to be in my office rather than at home. Which left me with the sudden urge to read– Josiah Royce. Don’t ask me why. It just came in a flash.