One of the ways I am rewilding my world/imagination is by regular, even daily skims and dives into my plibrary.  I have struggled to rewild my life with books, but I think I have begun to rekindle these powerful tools, books.  Here’s an example below:  the Encyclopedia Brittanica’s, two-volume syntopicon, The Great Ideas.

 

Setting atop the Syntopicon, Vol 1, I have Mark Musa’s translation of Dante’s Inferno.  How do these fit together?  There are 102 general ‘ideas’ categorized in there including “change”.

Inside this category of change is a reference under “The love and hatred of change” that refers to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto VII, lines 61-96.  That’s how this baby works.  It is an Aristotelian machine categorizing all of human knowledge.

I have always had a healthy disrespect for “the Canon”  of Western Lit, the so-called ‘old dead white men’, but attempts to categorize any wisdom are really powerful even if limited and limiting.  And as long as you are aware of the limitations, well…this tool is effectively limitless.

If somebody wants to expand this to all peoples and all wisdom, I welcome you to do so knowing that I will be one of your readers.  To make this tool more effective, it would be nice to own the entire set of The Great Books  of the Western World.  I do, however, have Musa’s translation and glosses which are helpful in the extreme. I had forgotten about the prodigal and the wrathful  and their punishment: endlessly rolling stones into each other from within a never ending circle.

I will probably be putting the two-volume Syntopicon on my desk next to the other grand lexical rewilder, Roget’s Thesaurus.