Footnotes to Myself

I'm in the process of trying to whittle down my "unread" bookcase. Around a year ago I divided up my books in an attempt to curb my gross consumerism. Books are my weakness. Used to be, I couldn't walk into Half-Price without leaving with about 10 books that I was going to read "one of these days . . ." The problem was that I was collecting a library of fancy books, and realizing that I had read precious few of them. I felt like I was guilty of false advertising, even if only to myself; saying "look at what a scholar I am", when in reality I was merely a masking my own ignorance.

I started out with a black and white dictum, that in order to be placed in the "read" bookcase, I must have read 90% of the book and understood it. This has evolved slowly. Now I am at the point where I simply have to get the gist, and if I haven't actually read much of it, I have to be able to tell you why I chose to count the book as being behind me.

There's a long tangential intro for you.

I guess I've grown tired of intensely perusing every book I read. It seems lately most of them only get one to two chapters worth of my attention before I realize that I don't really care enough to finish. Perhaps life is too short.

C.S. Lewis was my latest short-lived endeavor. He managed 12 pages of my attention before finding himself placed beside his other "read" works. On a certain level, I've grown weary of attempting to read books that don't speak to my world. There was a point, which doesn't really seem to be very distant, when I tried to listen to books in view of their own time and place. Certainly that was a beneficial exercise. Now, though, I'm ready to read people who have something applicable to say to exactly where I'm at, wherever that may be. Lewis' ideas seemed very Modern, and thus, when I hear them from my own situation, rather silly.

Whatever essay I was reading spent a lot of time defending the existence of the 'human soul and its immortality'. From a scientific and theological standpoint this is something I've completely ceased to believe in. I don't think there is anything immortal about us. Yet, I've started to realize that this is purely a matter of opinion, and it's basically an opinion that doesn't make much of a difference in anything. Lewis and countless other voices on my shelves, blather on adamantly defending their opinion as the only one which is viable . . . meanwhile the world-at-large seems to have completely ceased to care.

The majority of kids in my chemistry class, or people at my work, or people I pass on the street prove with their actions that they consider such thoughts to be total minutia. These thoughts may be interesting, like ancient history if told well can be interesting. They may even be important to explaining how we got where we are, but that's where their relevance stops and life's other, more pressing, difficulties begin.

I've got plenty of opinions, and I enjoy sharing them; even defending them. I feel I've spent most of my adult life forming my opinions and seeking to justify them over and against what I formerly thought was the truth. Now, I've got a bookcase glutted with endless footnotes on how I achieved my current state of opinion. If it seemed useful I could write one hell of a paper justifying my position on everything.

But no one appears to be asking me to justify myself. I, like most, live day to day in an anonymous sea of faces that hurry from one location to another, too busy to consider anything but how to finish all the items on their latest itinerary. All are quite content to let me stand still, endlessly justifying my own position so long as it doesn't interfere with their own to-do list. They ask me no questions, only pleading that I not slow them down.

The only question I really face is my own:
With all my volumes of facts informing my beliefs, how then should I live?

It's a long road to humility, and in the end we cover no distance at all.