Very often, what I’m reading fuels what I’m writing. At least over a period of time since that takes mulling. The last two things I’ve read are _The Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance_ and _Surely you’re joking Mr Feynman_. I’m ambivalent about both. I enjoyed Zen very much but I got lost during some of Phaedrus’ philosophical discussion of quality and I beg to differ that quality is lost once you begin to define it. Then again, the discussion of quality has come a long way since then (published in 1974). Also, I had hoped that throughout the narrative, his descriptives of “classical” versus “romantic” thinkers would have been better formed. I’m graceless in that I wanted the answers of dealing with dichotometric thought served piping hot and ready to eat on my platter.

Feynman’s book was another story, much of it familiar, in the respect of how he thinks, how things come to him, his approach, beliefs and philosophies. In his book, I found the kind of math that I’ve been looking for. I passed it off to BF who’s master of that dominion. It is said -in the community- that Feynman was autistic too. Well, I don’t know anything about that although I have no problem seeing how entire paragraphs could be lifted from this book and stuck into an anthology of autistic writers and you’d never know the difference. I was struck with that thought as I read, his writing was no different than what I’d read from autistic writers before. I was glad he wrote about smelling; he encouraged people to try to develop their sense of smell. Being smell sensitive is fairly typical of an autistic person. I know exactly what he meant -in the differences between smells- I just never had the words to express it. I think I’d like to try his smell experiment sometime (he had some people touch books when he was out of the room and when he came back in, he’d guess who’d touched what). I have learned more about people in my life through my sense of smell than anything else. I think it could be unnerving to an NT if they were to know how much we could know about them through smell alone. In a work situation, it’s easy to know who’s sleeping with whom if they both smell like sex. It’s not hard.

I’ve been looking for Eric Fromm’s _Escape from Freedom_. Someone mentions that some of my answers are here. It’s been harder to find although the excuse to visit used bookstores is a good one. I found another of his, on the pyschology of ethics. This is something that I’ve thought a lot about. I find that most people are not as honest as they think they are, or that their transgression is “okay” for whatever reason they’ve chosen to justify it with. I’ve resisted looking at it thus far but I’m expecting some commonalities with Richard Peck’s _People of the Lie_. The latter is a great book btw, something doesn’t have to be “big” to be evil. It’s small evils that weary our days.

In the mail: received a book of Da Vinci’s anatomical studies. I ordered it anticipating more details regarding proportionate studies and on a fast pass, I didn’t see those either. I did see there were some comparative studies (other mammals) which is interesting but not relevant for my purposes. Also, Gillian’s Bias Pattern Cutting which I’ll review as well.