LibraryThing
A member since January 2008.
“When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.” – Erasmus
Goodreads
A member of Goodreads since January 2010.
Reading Interests: current affairs, politics, sociology, history, biographies, memoirs, classics, humor, spirituality, philosophy, Buddhism, indigenous affairs, fiction, satire, travel and more.
Reading & Book Collecting
Craig’s interest in books and reading developed most noticeably when he was in Japan. Isolation and culture-shock led him to seeking out English reading material in his Japanese High School library. Read more about it below.
Imola library in Emilia-Romagna region of Italy – 2016
Sala Borsa library (R) in Bologna, Italy – 2016
Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana – Venice, Italy – 2016
The National Library of Australia in Canberra
Personal library and study in Toorak – 2008
Personal library and study in Canberra – 2018
How I came to develop a passion for reading & books
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
For most of my younger years, until I was a teenager, I read books at school, like many other students.
In our family house we had a small library of books. If you added them all up, I guess there might have been two hundred or so. The bulk of them were kept behind glass in my mother’s book cabinet in the lounge room.
A small separate collection was found on compact shelves in my father’s caravan. These were mainly small format paperbacks he had acquired before meeting my mother.
Sitting in the book cabinet you could find books on painting, local history, war, gems, geography, music, first aid, self-help, politics and cooking. Mixed in with them were dictionaries, thesauruses, biographies, a few classic novels, atlases, hardcover photographic books, car manuals, family albums and miscellaneous books.
A few of the books I paid particular attention to were books by authors I knew.
In the 1980s our family did an Alpha Dynamics course with Andrew Matthews. He was making a name for himself as a motivational speaker and published a best-selling self-help book titled ‘Being Happy’.
We had our signed copy of Andrew’s book at home, purchased perhaps to help reinforce many of the techniques we had learned to set goals, improve our thinking and remain “positive”.
There was also mum’s friend Jeanette Bartlett’s book, ‘180 Years of Victor Harbor History in Many Pictures with Some Words’. My mother was quite proud of Jeanette’s book and would tend to handle her book differently.
Admittedly, in my teens our household was more likely to be found listening to music or the radio, watching television or outdoors, than reading. My father Ralph, regularly read the weekend papers. While my mother Mary was essentially aliterate. She could read, but rarely to chose to do so. In the late 1980s her interest turned to computers.
Our family watched up to four hours of television most nights. News, current affairs, documentaries and “quality” films got our attention. With only one television, our family viewing was selective and somewhat democratic. Television might have been putting my brother and I at risk of illiteracy, had we not had sheds with a pool table and table tennis table, and a rumpus room to retreat to. Unlike other households we did not have a VHS player.
Occasionally we would open the book cabinet to take down a book, often just to reference a dictionary or an encyclopedia. My father’s National Geographic magazine collection was displayed in that same cabinet, and reading them brought me the most joy in my youth. (1)
Was I reading the Nat Geos from cover to cover? I am not so sure. It was more akin to browsing, since all I seemed to be reading were the photo captions. The quality infographics and text boxes often caught my attention.
I was more active in my youth and much more likely to be found outdoors, than settling down to read. I was more of a Tom Sawyer than a Thomas Paine.
Ahead of books came gymnastics, tennis, squash, BMX riding and motorcycling. Even guitar playing would rate higher on my list of interests.
I still wonder if denying my brother and I access to comics backfired? Did it have the reverse effect and forestall our early teenage reading progress?
So when did my interest in books start?
If there was a definitive turning point, it probably wasn’t until I returned from a year away in Japan where I was hosted as an exchange student.
Returning to Australia in early 1990, I lived with my aunty Heather in Adelaide, South Australia. It was then that I started paying closer attention to books and reading. This was also when I started my first year of study at Flinders University.
REVERSE CULTURE SHOCK
I was 17 at that time and I was suffering from what is commonly called reverse culture shock. To be sure, Japan was a great experience, however, I wasn’t in the least prepared for, nor expecting the jarring return to ‘life in Australia’ that I did. Most of the time it was unclear to me what I was experiencing.
How could the normal be so strange? How was it that the familiar was now foreign?
No doubt, living in Japan had left a big impression on me, including in ways I myself was unaware of. It was a formative experience. In fact, so much so that my family had trouble recognising many of my new mannerisms and behaviour. In their eyes, I came back to Australia a changed person; a remarkably different son to the one who had left Australian shores the year before.
IDENTITY SHIFT
For a while family members nervously laughed at me when I kept bowing. To their bemusement this ingrained respectful habit continued for many weeks. They were somewhat phased that I had become more private and withdrawn, whereas I just thought I was more self-contained and centred.
Where I was once considered outgoing and lively, friends around me were commenting how much quieter I had become. I can only assume, they too compared the Craig they had said goodbye to at the airport with his glowing tan, muscles, boyish grin and larrikin streak, to the much whiter, skinner and solemn Craig they unsuccessfully tried to goad “back to normal”.
I simply wasn’t demanding the same attention. I wasn’t occupying the same social spaces I had in the past.
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Perhaps because of this personal change, I did not reconnect well with many of my family and old friends. I became more of a loner; more aloof. I was someone comfortable spending time by myself, thinking my own thoughts and occupying my own time. Frankly, I just wasn’t interested in the same things my old friends appeared to be interested in at their stage of life. I was out of step with my peers.
GAP YEAR IRONY
On reflection, the whole gap year episode in my youth was filled with a good deal of irony, since I recall overhearing adult discussions about the pros and cons of sending me to Japan when the offer was finally made by the local Rotary Club.
Much of it centred around why involving me in a year long exchange program would be preferable to sending me straight off to university following my matriculation from high school.
As I had completed my secondary studies quite young at 16, one dubious line of thinking at the time was that I might be “too young” for the university experience. In this response there was a hint of concern that I might not be ready to “face the melee” all undergraduates encounter on campus. To avoid this, it was reasoned, a productive gap year would steel me for better future social adjustment on campus. If nothing else I would be a year older and more mature.
On reflection that line of thinking was laughable.
In the place of moving a mere 80 kilometres to the city of Adelaide to attend university at 16, there I was potentially being supported in an exchange program that would amount to a vastly more socially demanding transition – a full year living in Japan.
CAN I GO TO CANADA?
This is an aside, but yes I was consulted about all the options for a gap year. And I knew I was lucky to have options.
Truth be known, I wanted to go on exchange to Canada. The articles and photos of Canada in dad’s Nat Geo mags must have been that much more appealing. The idea of skiing and exploring Canada’s forests suddenly held much greater allure, than what little I knew of Japan.
Besides, my overtly more ambitious exchange student peers were nearly all clambering to get to Japan. They and their families were likely responding to Japan’s economic rise in the 1980s. Nippon was the future. A year in Japan, the thinking went, was a ticket to improved career opportunities down the line.
If I recall correctly, Japan was number 3 or 4 on my choice of destinations. I was convinced the Rotary assessment panel and psychologists would rule me out as a suitable contender to be matched with that country. As for my match with Canada? Not a problem.
“You guys go to Tokyo, I will be happy with Toronto or Vancouver”, I thought to myself.
To everyone’s surprise my first round offer from Rotary International was to Japan.
Days later, I said yes.
SOCIAL INHIBITION & JAPANESE-LIKE RESERVE
So when I did finally attended university back in Australia after time in Japan, it was an unwelcome surprise to family and friends to learn that I did not fit in like many other students. Reverse culture shock made forming friendships as readily as others tricky. Instead I quite contently spent time mostly to myself.
If anything, my trip to Japan had compounded the complexity of fully engaging with university life. My newly acquired sense of Japanese reserve with its respectful calls for mindfulness and careful displays of behaviour, left me rather judgemental of the revelry around me.
Had I turned into a prig?
CROSS-INSTITUTE STUDENT
The other unusual aspect of my first undergraduate year of university study was that I wasn’t just studying at Flinders University. I was what is termed a cross-institute student.
Not only was I taking on more than a standard full study load, I was also travelling between the Flinders campus in the southern suburbs and the Adelaide University campus in the heart of the city. It was on the Adelaide University city campus that I continued my study of Japanese language; a course of study not on offer at Flinders University at the time.
In that first year, the cross-institute arrangement added to the sense of not belonging to either institution. There I was constantly floating between the two. Yet, I loved access to both university libraries, particularly the Barr Smith Library.
Socially, access to both campuses enabled me to observe and interact with a wider number of international students, particularly students from Asian countries with whom I felt a could develop a much more comfortable rapport with. It proved to be so. Soon enough I formed loose friendships with students from Japan, Hong Kong and Malaysia.
AWAKENING ASIAPHILE AUSTRALIA
At the time my own Asiaphilia was flourishing, there was much talk taking place in Australia about ‘connecting with Asia’, ‘partnering with Japan’ and ‘aligning ourselves with our region’.
The likes of the Ross Garnaut Report of 1989 was steering Australia towards a greater economic integration with Asia through trade liberalisation. (2) Hawke and Keating were clearly focused on Northeast Asia and positioning Australia to meet the needs of rapidly growing markets to our north.
I wasn’t oblivious to all this, since I relished reading newspapers from across the country in the university libraries.
MAJOR AUSTRALIAN INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS
I took note of the debate around plans for a ‘Multi-Function Polis’ in Adelaide and a ‘Very Fast Train’ to connect Melbourne to Sydney. The inference was that with ‘their help’ Australia was set to build and achieve wonderful things, or so the politicians and captains of industry believed.
Meanwhile there I was riding back and forth in red carriage trains around Adelaide with the doors left wide open to prevent the overheating passengers from cooking in very fast time.
ACADEMIC LIBRARIES
My initial time at university wasn’t all negatively impacted by reverse culture shock. It had its appeal.
I didn’t hang in the bars. I wasn’t in the cricket nets. I occasionally went to concerts and theatre. A few public forums attracted me.
Above all, though, what I found wonderful were the enormous university libraries. They were jewels; places of great fascination for me. Thanks to the librarians and teachers – as well as my own nous – I quickly learnt how to navigate information systems in the libraries and enjoyed doing so.
Bypassing the catalogues altogether, I loved setting aside some time to simply explore the stacks in a haphazard way. I must have taken down and browsed hundreds of books like this in my first year.
JAPANESE HIGH SCHOOL LIBRARY
During the previous year in Komaki in Japan, I spent almost half my school time studying and being tutored in the high school library (pictured).
I was partly cocooned there because I needed to study Japanese. In terms of languages, having only studied basic Latin and French back in Australia, I was starting ‘Nihongo’ from scratch. Accordingly, many of the standard classes at my host school – Komaki Minami Senior High School – were understandably too hard for me follow when delivered in Japanese.
These lengthy periods of confinement to the library environment in Japan, undoubtedly predisposed me to developing a deeper interest and appreciation of university libraries back in Australia.
I was also naturally curious, and remain so to this day. For this reason I wanted to not just find the books that I needed for my courses, I wanted to spend my free time wandering up and down the aisles discovering books that grabbed my attention.
ENGLISH ENCYCLOPEDIAS
Alone in the Japanese library I would take a break from my Japanese studies and immerse myself in reading sections and articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica. This is where I met Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Kant all for the first time, along with beguiling summaries of existentialism and the notion of a canon of Western philosophy. I consulted the set for insights on Zen Buddhism, the Meiji restoration, Taoism, Shintoism and much more.
If I found a subject or a person of interest, I would often be left unsatisfied; frustrated that I could not delve any deeper by simply picking up a related book in English on any of the shelves around me. They just weren’t there in that Japanese library. Like the encyclopedia articles themselves, my learning was seemingly abridged.
In truth, ultimately it was my own shortcomings I was up against. My initial Japanese proficiency was at such a relatively low standard, particularly in terms of my ability to read kanji (Japanese characters), that it was a painstakingly slow process to attempt to comprehend and digest the vast majority of reading on offer in the collection of Japanese books around me.
JAPANESE BOOKSTORES – MARUZEN NAGOYA
Ever sympathetic to helping me adjust to my new exchange student life in Japan and hearing my grumbles about this frustration, the Funabashi family – my wonderfully generous first Japanese host family from the Komaki Rotary Club – sprang into action.
They started accompanying me to the large Maruzen bookstore in the nearby city of Nagoya. Maruzen was a megastore filled with English language magazines and an impressive range of titles. It was there that I acquired better reference books, and discovered Takeo Doi’s insightful works (3) on Japanese psychology, as well as Ruth Benedict’s classic ‘The Chrysanthemum and the Sword’. (4)
In time I began to hold certain publishers in esteem, particularly Tuttle and Kodansha, because they were the companies I understood that were based in Japan and were dedicated to publishing books on Japan in English.
At this point, I only hope these short select background stories help contextualise why it was that back in Australia I was excited to find myself in libraries. I could finally relate to them.
MY FIRST LANGUAGE ADVANTAGE
What was wonderfully obvious – but delightful nonetheless – about the university libraries was that unlike the Japanese library, the vast majority of books were in English. I felt empowered. Gone were the language limitations I faced in Japan. It was liberating.
And with this, I finally felt I could get on and pursue my reading interests from one book to the next. I could potentially make use of the full collection.
With this the allure of the libraries grew. For the first time, I felt I was competently navigating my way through a sea of knowledge.
AUSTRALIAN HIGH SCHOOL LIBRARY ENCOUNTER
Whilst my time in Victor Harbor High School in Australia included an introduction to the use of library catalogues, if I am to be honest, I didn’t make regular use of them. My high school library was identified as more of a retreat for study geeks, a place to convene student representative meetings and a sensible place to watch VHS videos on rainy day lunch breaks.
Perhaps more tellingly for me personally, I can recall an early high school library exercise that required me to look up the catalogue and retrieve a sizeable Edge Allen Poe book. At around 12 years of age I took it down from the shelves and thumbed through the pages. When I did I was momentarily overcome by a wave of dread and feelings of inadequacy. So much of it was indecipherable to me. So much of what he was writing about was dark. Some of his expressions and sentences were odd. Why? Are all big books like this?
This fleeting episode triggered a thought: how many more of these books around me were like this, I pondered? Were they all this difficult? It was certainly an off-putting experience.
Looking back, I guess then and there I formed the impression that spending any more time in the library than was absolutely necessary, would risk me feeling vulnerable again in a similar equally deflating way.
Poe has been my bête noire ever since.
THE LIBRARY CATALOGUE
After a few weeks on both university campuses I became quite familiar with the Dewey catalogue. And in doing so it at some point it struck me that my course of study would only see me studying small sections of this great library. This early realisation left me feeling somewhat cheated. I instinctually felt that something was lacking in resigning oneself to such a narrow “degree” of specialisation. It felt restrictive and wholly incomplete.
Being directed to read only a select number of books in the 300 social sciences collection and a few in the 900 range of books was in my simple thinking, pathetically limiting.
I wanted a complete overview. I was grasping for an understanding of what the whole library had to offer. For instance, I recognised my desire to become familiar with what the books of literature on the 800 shelves could teach me, just as I wanted to know what the philosophy books in the 100 classification could teach me.
Of course I didn’t know it at the time, but this impulse is that of a polymath.
HUNGER TO LEARN
I was hungry to learn and naïve enough to set about building a more comprehensive knowledge on my own terms.
Not having many distractions, outside commitments and few university friends, I had essentially ensured I had created plenty of time to set about doing just that.
Before long, I went from reading snippets of books standing in the aisles, to taking a selection of books back to read at desks throughout the library. I soon discovered a plethora of academic journals and did much the same with many of them too.
What were all these volumes about? Who was researching and writing all this? How did they get published? Why were they published, and why were they important enough to be in the library?
In these early days my mind was racing with questions and filling with awe.
FAMILY INFLUENCE & SUPPORT
In my first year of university, whilst living at my aunty Heather’s house, there were occasional weekends I would join her on visits to various second-hand shops, bookshops and garage sales.
My aunty was a keen book collector and was a mature age post-grad student herself, so some of her academic interests helped shaped my own. I am grateful for this influence.
The running joke between us was that I was using my newly acquired knowledge of psychology and operant conditioning to convince her to take me to bookstores and ultimately for her to bequeath me her entire book collection in her last will and testament.
Not having much money, it soon became apparent that I could not afford to buy many books, especially new books, so I seized on making full use of my borrowing rights at university.
BAGS OF BOOKS & BLUSHES
There were days when I filled my university bag to the brim with books.
I was often more than a little embarrassed about borrowing so many books. Looking around the library, I noted that not many others students were doing the same. Their rush would be mainly to borrow the required reading, and even that appeared to be begrudgingly done by the bulk of undergraduate students.
My moments of embarrassment in the library stemmed from being worried what the librarians at the counter might ask me, not just about the number of books I was wanting to borrow, but also why I was selecting what I was selecting?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires courage.
AWKWARD & SELF-CONSCIOUS
I was self-conscious about my unusual behaviour and knew too well that I didn’t know enough about many of the books I selected, or the topics, to explain my choices in detail, should they ask. This dread receded over time, but it took many months before I felt comfortable taking my library borrowing to the limit.
THE STUDENT STRUGGLE
With my bag of books so heavy, I would often struggle to return home. I owned neither a car, nor a bicycle. To return home I had to catch a bus, then a train and then walk about 500 metres down a suburban street. My aunty Heather’s house was perched on a cliff in the suburb of Hallett Cover over-looking the ocean to the west.
Even though it was a stunning location with easy beach access and brilliant sunsets, there were occasional pangs of envy seeing the lives of students who lived on or near the campus. Their gregarious student lives appeared so easy-going in comparison to my own.
Life is always surprising us – not by its rich, seething layer of bestial refuse – but by the bright, healthy and creative human powers of goodness that are for ever forcing their way up through it. It is those powers that awaken our indestructible hope that a brighter, better and more humane life will once again be reborn.
My Childhood – maxim gorky
A STUDY OF MY OWN
That said, I was lucky to be staying where I was. Heather’s two sons – my cousins – had left home. They were out exploring life. She was living alone and had two spare rooms.
With some quietly spoken negotiations with my mother – her sister – Heather kindly allowed me to use one of the boy’s rooms as my bedroom and the other across the hall as a converted study. It was ideal setup for a serious student, although on reflection the arrangement perhaps added to my isolation.
When I arrived home, my bag of books would be carefully emptied out onto the study desk one by one. It was like unloading a carefully picked harvest, or the spoils of a rewarding hunt. Handling each book I marvelled at the covers, the titles and the names of authors.
AUTODIDACT OR DILETTANTE?
Each time I settled down to study I would pause to wonder how much I could really come to understand about each book? What would interest me? Was this a significant author? And how did they get so much knowledge to enable them to write an entire book? The feeling was a mix of anticipation, awe and admiration.
Of course, I also borrowed the books that I had to study, but I had a sense that that was too easy for me. A combination of ignorance and innocence prevented me from weighing up the dangers of distraction. I was blissfully unaware of what traps lay before me if I formed the habits of a dilettante.
I merely wanted to follow my own interests and not just be told what I had to read and reference. I was very self-directed. Unbeknown to me at the time, I was starting down the path of being self-taught; of becoming an autodidact.
“Only the autodidacts are free.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
ARTS DEGREE
My field of formal study at university was shaped by the Arts degree I enrolled in. The required reading concentrated on the social sciences. In my first year I was undertaking what was deemed more than a full time load of study. I was embarking on a double major in psychology and politics.
To set this up I had to do some fast talking to reassure the sceptical enrolment officers during enrolment week. They (and I) had to ask, if I could realistically manage the extra study? Somehow I convinced them in the end that I could. It was up to me to prove myself right.
With what little I knew then, I enjoyed the promise of these subjects, but quickly realised that to “master them” it would be wise to read more widely. This proved to be the case. Our subject reading guides and tutors soon made this recommendation clear to us too.
“If you’ve got the chance, take a look at the additional reading. It will hold you in good stead,” they would say. On announcing this I can recall the sound of muffled groans that went up around me in the lecture hall.
Within the first few weeks I understood that politics was deeply connected with history and philosophy. Similarly, I understood that psychology was connected with medicine, science, philosophy and history too. There really were branches of knowledge out there to be explored, which ever subject you chose.
THE BEAUTY OF BIBLIOGRAPHIES
It didn’t stop there however – books, particularly academic books made multiple references to other books, journal articles and research papers. There was a thrill in discovering this and making the myriad of connections to wider research, study and writing. I was hooked, and soon found myself engrossed in the idea of going off and piecing it all together as best I could.
To this end, it wasn’t long before I mastered the skill of scanning books and using the bibliographies in the back of books to guide me to my own independent wider reading. It was like exploring a web of knowledge, and all this was at a time before the internet was widely used. Back then manual catalogues were still around and in use in parallel with simple computer catalogues.
Google had yet arrived.
STUDY NOTES
With more books coming across my desk at home, I started taking rudimentary notes. Likely suggested by my aunty, I used index cards and started writing down quotes from books, noting the title, author, page numbers, and the call number of each book. ISBNs weren’t unfamiliar to me either.
I was beginning to create my own reading record. Self-motivated, I liked reading in this way. Often, I read late into the night and would wake up exhausted the next morning. Feeling tired I faced a full day of commuting and study ahead.
I rarely, if ever drank alcohol in that first year. My hangovers, were study hangovers.
Biography provides us with the data, the means by which we can seek to draw meaning from human life and experience. It can also help us in our attempt to understand those who appear inexplicable, whose motivations deviate so far from the norm that the mass of us feel we would like to understand them.
– Stuart hannabuss & Rita marcella – Biography and children
COLIN WILSON’S – THE OUTSIDER
My intense reading habits were not entirely unfamiliar to me. The year before starting university I read a book in Japan. It was a book by Colin Wilson called The Outsider. Over the course of a few weeks, I read Wilson’s book at night whilst staying with my first host family. I think reading any English book was comforting for me at the time, as during the day I was studying Japanese quite intensively and longed for the ease and familiarity of the English language.
Wilson’s book was enthralling. It was partly autobiographical and gave an account of his own journey as a reader, writer and thinker. He was very driven and intelligent, and I hoped that some of his journey might rub off on me. The subject matter of his critical book looked at society through the lens of romantic characters, outsider literature and existential philosophy.
Wilson’s work left a deep impression on me. Reading Wilson proved to me that well researched and crafted books, the ones that take hold of you at least, have a tremendous ability to convey inspiring insights into the lives of extraordinary people, both real and fictional.
The Outsider also introduced me to the concept of ‘peak experiences’. (5)
CRITICAL THINKING
At university I was learning how to write persuasive essays. I found this interesting, but I was struggling at times with how to make my arguments and what conclusions I wanted to draw from my study.
It’s one thing to read voraciously. It is, however, an entirely different matter to digest and sort through arguments in order to formulate your own position or opinion on topics of consequence. Even if you are agreeing with another thinker, what exactly are you agreeing with about his or her argument?
Fortunately, one of my university subjects was critical thinking. This helped me a great deal, although I still found many of my early essays came back carrying red pen marks throughout.
My tutors and lecturers offered constructive criticism, although I found more than a few of the comments a little dispiriting at times.
MY INTEREST IN JAPAN & BUDDHISM GROWS
Between writing essays, some of my wider independent reading continued to be influenced by my time in Japan and the books I read there.
This was reflected in my choice of reading about Japanese history, culture, religion and mythology. I was also drawn to reading about Buddhism, since my best friend in Japan was the son of a Zen Buddhist master. I wanted to build on my knowledge about that world.
YOGA
Privately acknowledging that I was a somewhat socially awkward student, and that my breathing was shallow, I joined a Hatha Yoga class at Flinders University.
To this day, I am convinced reading Joseph Campbell’s book on The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology had a factor to play in making this decision to turn to yoga an easy one. (6)
Pleasingly, the classes opened me to meeting people outside of my courses.
As for the yoga techniques, they enabled me to relax and stretch my body, and more importantly deepen my breathing. Yoga classes also broke up my time between attending lectures, participating in tutorials and dashing off to the … (you guessed it) library.
DEBATING
Later in the year, with some renewed social confidence, I made several visits to the Flinders University debating club/society. I considered myself a confident public speaker having addressed audiences in high school and in Japan on a regular basis.
I remember participating in only one debate that year and found it demanding. All the other speakers were very well prepared and had years of experience. I must have been a strange interloper to this tight knit group. Be that as it may, I spoke with conviction.
EARLY EXPOSURE TO POLITICS
Outside of study, I also attended public meetings on campus and even went along to a public forum held by a new political party called The Greens. At that first Greens meeting, I found my bag filled not just with books, but also with political pamphlets. I had enthusiastically agreed to distribute them in my neighbourhood on their behalf. I suspect they were pleased with their enthusiastic new recruit.
At the Greens meeting I even found the confidence to ask some of the representatives as to whether they had read any of the authors I had been reading? I was surprised when they said they hadn’t.
I was a little shocked by their response, as I assumed they would have been more well-read on politics and philosophy. By that stage I was reading Herbert Marcuse and other similarly polemical authors who were critical of society, politics and the direction modern society was heading. (7)
Why weren’t these political party members reading such material, I wondered? What were they reading?
AUTHORS SHAPING MY THINKING
In that first year at university, some of the big names that I recall reading included Dogen Zenji, Daisetzu Suzuki, Kenichi Ohmae, Carl Jung, Martin Thurber, Joseph Campbell, Alvin Toffler, Stanislav Groff, Ken Wilber, Robert M Pirsig, Henry David Thoreau, Alan Watts, Yatri, Charles Birch, Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche, Krishnamurti, Colin Wilson, Fritjof Capra, Oswald Spengler and Khalil Gibran.
If you are familiar with any of these authors and thinkers, you might recognise, I was straying some way from politics and psychology. I was leaning more towards philosophers, eastern mystics, trans-disciplinary thinkers and a range of counter-cultural perspectives.
Keep in mind I had just turned 18 and was very impressionable.
Through study and thinking, people transform information into personal knowledge. People gain wisdom by integrating and analysing their accumulated knowledge.
– David Moursund
BROWSING BEYOND CAMPUS
It wasn’t long before the university library wasn’t my only source of books.
Wandering through Adelaide, much as the flaneurs would in the books I would read years later, I found myself seeking out bookshops. My time was spent mostly window shopping at places like Imprint Books and O’Connell’s Bookshop. I was found in alternative bookshops like Cosmic Pages and Quantum Books, and in the Theosophical Bookshop. I haunted as many academic second-hand bookshops and book exchanges as I could find.
On reflection, it is obvious; I was mapping out my sites of inspiration and looking for sources of learning beyond the campus.
REACTING TO SCIENTISM
About halfway through my first year, I found that my study of psychology was becoming decidedly dry and tedious. Science, quantitative studies and statistics were creeping into my psychology classes. I reacted negatively to this, as I was more enthralled with the philosophical, religious and mythological study of society, human minds and human potential.
My grandfather Leslie, who was a quantity surveyor in Sydney, most likely would have reacted disapprovingly had he discovered my tendency to want to stray from the cold clear line of reason and rationality.
Yet this was my reality. The scientific aspect of psychology was taking me further away from the direction I was pursuing with my own independent study. My formal study and informal study were diverging.
I understood the significance of bell curves (pictured), but Buddhist mandalas were more profound and interesting. I was looking for meaning more than means and averages.
Here was a young man still forming his own identity and exploring where his passions might take him.
Exacerbating this inner-tension over the direction of my study was the fact that human nature was being presented in some of these subjects in crude reductionist terms.
Humans were “broken down” and reduced to base desires, to selfishness and to crude motivations; many of which I myself could not always accept, nor readily identify with.
My parallel informal reading was exposing me to what I considered were much more evolved insights and states of being; to mystical experiences, to ideals of compassion, to unity, to universal connections and to higher states of being.
Pavlov’s dogs were just responding to snacks. I was responding to what we humans could learn through turning our attention to peak experiences and exploring synchronicity.
Where is the wisdom we’ve lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we’ve lost in information?
– T.S. Eliot
MANIPULATION vs SELF-MASTERY
In some respects, my continued study of psychology was proving to be shallow and the essence of politics was revealing itself to be unnecessarily nasty and brutish.
In both politics and psychology the instrumental aspect of both disciplines left me feeling that manipulation loomed large as a priority. Too little time was spent unpacking emancipation, positive human endeavours and the deeper philosophical foundations and their assumptions.
Control and power over others appeared to be the focus, where I was keener on self-mastery and peaceful co-existence.
The early signs of my disengagement were beginning to emerge. How could I reconcile the divergence? Could it be done? The existential questions came bubbling to the surface.
Could I take all that I was studying formerly as gospel? Were there other valid perspectives that might help better shape my worldview and belief systems?
I would keep reading… and thinking. It was only my first year at university. I had time.
The philosophical autobiographer uneasily discovers his or her vulnerability to the uncertain nature of the self even as that self writes about itself.
Stuart hannabuss
Works cited and wider reading
- National Geographic magazines. Ralph Hodges’ collection in the late 1980s included over 100 issues by that time.
- Australia and the Northeast Asian ascendancy : Report to the Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade / Ross Garnaut. (1989)
- The Anatomy of Dependence / Takeo Doi (1973) & The Anatomy of Self: The Individual versus Society / Takeo Doi (1986)
- Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture / Ruth Benedict (1988) – First published in 1946.
- The Outsider / Colin Wilson (1956)
- Oriental Mythology (The Masks of God, #2) / Joseph Campbell (1982) – First published in 1962.
- One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society / Herbert Marcuse (1964)
Craig Leslie Hodges 