Influences, books

I drew up this list last night:

King James Bible
Homer
Shakespeare
Democracy in America
Gibbon
On War
Wealth of Nations
Reformed Systematic Theology
Ouspensky
Thucydides
Plutarch
History of the World
de Sade (porn, violence, fallen nature)
Austen

I know it looks familiar. I was trying to imagine myself alive in the middle of the 1800s and thinking what list of books would make a complete foundation (not including science and art, you know, just what you get from literature).

There are fourteen works (22 if you break them down further). Not my usual ten or twelve list. Seven times two, perfection doubled? 22, the number of letters in the Hebrews alphabet. Anyway, I needed fourteen spots.

The interesting one for me is Austen. Instead of listing seven great novels, or whatever, I see the novel as a particularly feminine form. At best it tunes you into the intricacies of society and human interactions. Human nature and the ways of the world. Austen in limited in her canvass, but you get war and diplomacy and all that from history too. But for me I just recall I had to read Pride and Prejudice in high school and it was opaque to me. I needed to awaken and develop and be able to see human nature at work and subtleties of interaction. That is what the novel gives you. Or, maybe better put, the novel gives you something to gauge your development and ability to see such things. So I put Austen in the list to represent that.

Democracy in America is a French work, remember. To me it is one of those works that is just deeply on-the-mark regarding its subject. It has that common-sense, competent, tuned-in, expressed-completely-well, foundational elements of understanding. Works like that tend to be also prophetic. They describe a time or thing so well that it also describes the future.

One could, of course, instead of writing just Thucydides, put in Greek Historians, which traditionally refer to Herodotus and Thucydides.

I want to put in a word for Ouspensky's New Model of the Universe. Going over those essays again is profitable. I can see that I picked up a lot of the cosmological elements and understanding of the Work from that book. Remember he rewrote the book in the late '20's to incorporate his Work understanding.

A while back when I said I'd forgotten that you need Work material to go along with self-remembering effort, what I didn't see then was I wasn't missing the psychological half of the Work, but I was far away from the cosmological part of the Work. Which not only gives insight into time and such things but provides metaphor to see the psychological part more deeply and in new ways.