Discovered during a downpour

 

The philosophy book lay open on the walkway.  The rain pounding it relentlessly puffed up the pages and warped the cover, but I felt compelled to rescue it.  This was a collection of ideas, albeit soggy, they were thoughts and leaving it to a fate such as this seemed somehow wrong. 

Over time, I would dry it, and attempt advanced first aid in an effort to save it.  It may, of course, have been easier to simply buy a new copy of the same book, but this one now had life experience.  It has been out in the real world, not just carried between lecture halls in the darkness of some backpack, wedged between science, logic or introduction to architecture.  It has developed its own personality.  It has ventured outdoors and survived.   

I would have to read this philosophy with a seriousness and reverence that it now deserved.  All too many books fall victim to highlighters, underlining or notes scribbled in the margins, by students not seeing beyond the next exam.  Feeble attempts to memorize dates and names, missing altogether the burnt match laying next to the lit candle.

I believe the key to understanding the messages within a philosophy is to carefully lift the words and look beneath them.  For example, just below the word Epistemology lives a slippery little creature called, Theory.
The theory of knowledge often slips right past the casual observer, but once you’re holding up one end of that word and having a flashlight in the other hand, your attention can’t help but see it squirming right there before your eyes.   Understanding rises up like an odor that’s been growing from the lack of sunlight.  No longer is there a need for memorization.  The combination of the scent and the strain of holding up such a large word tends to lock itself in your frontal lobe.  Recall becomes easy, simply by seeing epistemology in print once again.  “Oh yes, that is the theory of knowledge.”

Just as the scent of the burnt match triggers your mind to recall the light coming from the candle.  The philosophy is that circle of glow around the flame.  Speaking of knowledge, never try to dry out pages of a book with a candle.