My Top Ten Books Tim Freeman 1. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche.

This is a book that has to be read many times over, forwards and backwards and sidewards in order for the alchemical imagery to take effect, and I had that experience when I carried the book with me on a three day trek through the crater at the summit of Haleakala, or "The House of the Sun," that is the main volcano of the island of Maui. I spent the first night at the summit and woke up to the most dramatic sunrise of my life. First Mars rose red on the horizon, then Venus, the bright "morning star" below, then equidistantly spaced below a crescent Moon rose cradling Venus and Mars. Finally, also in perfect alignment and spacing, the Sun and its golden light broke forth, and for the first time in my life I saw the Big Island of Hawaii, its two great peaks rising above the clouds against the background of the rose-colored sky. That was in the fall of 85, that first term in the Ph.D. program at Manoa, when I had the great good fortune of taking a seminar on this text from Graham Parkes. Nietzsche suggests this book is a tragedy, a remark that has puzzled folks for years as it doesn't have the form of a tragedy. But I think what he meant is that he aims to do in this book what he thought was the aim of Greek tragedy, what he thought was the highest aim of all art. The highest aim of art, Nietzsche thought, was not just pretty pictures, the making of something beautiful, adding a pleasing aesthetic dimension to life (though he did recognize that this has its place), not just expressing emotions or feelings or communicating ideas, certainly not clever comments on the history of art. The highest aim of art was transfiguration--art as a catalyst for dramatic transformation of self ... evolution ... overcoming . . . enlightenment. This process is suggested through rich streams of imagery, much of it alchemical, a transformation of something base into gold, to suggest this metamorphosis of the soul--an inner fiery transformation of the soul that is suffering, marked by the spirit of revenge, unable overcome the problem of time and time's passing, unable to overcome the tragic character of existence, to a soul capable of saying 'yes' and affirming life even in its hardest moments, a soul capable of the giftgiving love, symbolized by the shinning of the golden Sun. I suspect Nietzsche may have been influenced by the medieval Persian poet Hafiz in the way he uses the shining Sun as a metaphor for the gift-giving love. Nietzsche mentions Hafiz together with Goethe as providing examples of an exhuberant life-affirming art. I'm guessing Nietzsche must have read this poem by Hafiz. Perhaps it because of this poem by the Persian poet that Nietzsche uses the name of the ancient Persian prophet for his protagonist.
Even After All this time The Sun never says to the Earth, "You owe me."

Look What happens With a love like that, It lights the whole sky.

I could choose any number of famous passages from this book, but I will go with this one, which struck me so powerfully at the time. I think "The Night Song" expresses the lovesickness the protagonist has yet to overcome. The goal is the gold of the gift-giving love and yet this song expresses the anguish of the "solitude of the sun." Whereas the stars shine together in the darkness of night, the sun is alone in the daylight. Nietzsche wrote this book while trying to recover from his own lovesickness that followed after that fateful encounter with Lou Andreas-Salome. In a letter to a friend at the time Nietzsche writes: "Unless I can learn the alchemist's trick of turning this filth into gold I am lost." I think Nietzsche wrote "The Night Song" while staying in a room overlooking the famous fountain in the Piazza De Ferrari, the main square, in Genoa.
THE NIGHT SONG Night has come; now all fountains speak more loudly. And my soul too is a fountain. Night has come; only now all the songs of lovers awaken. And my soul too is the song of a lover. Something unstilled, unstillable is within me; it wants to be voiced. A craving for love is within me; it speaks the language of love. Light am I; ah, that I were night! But this is my loneliness that I am girt with light. Ah, that I were dark and nocturnal! How I would suck at the breasts of light! And even you would I bless, you little sparkling stars and glowworms up there, and be overjoyed with your gifts of light. But I live in my own light; I drink back into myself the flames that break out of me. I do not know the happiness of those who receive; and I have often dreamed that even stealing must be more blessed than receiving. This is my poverty, that my hand never rests from giving; this is my envy, that I see waiting eyes and the lit-up nights of longing. Oh, wretchedness of all givers! Oh, darkening of my sun! Oh, craving to crave! Oh, ravenous hunger in satiation! They receive from me, but do I touch their souls? There is a cleft between giving and receiving; and the narrowest cleft is the last to be bridged. A hunger grows out of my beauty: I should like to hurt those for whom I shine; I should like to rob those to whom I give; thus do I hunger for malice. To withdraw my hand when the other hand already reaches out to it; to linger like the waterfall, which lingers even while it plunges: thus do I hunger for malice. Such revenge my fullness plots: such spite wells up out of my loneliness. My happiness in giving died in giving; my virtue tired of itself in its overflow. The danger of those who always give is that they lose their sense of shame; and the heart and hand of those who always mete out become callous from always meting out. My eye no longer wells over at the shame of those who beg; my hand has grown too hard for the trembling of filled hands. Where have the tears of my eyes gone and the down of my heart? Oh the loneliness of all givers! Oh, the taciturnity of all who shine!

Many suns revolve in the void: to all that is dark they speak with their light-to me they are silent. Oh, this is the enmity of the light against what shines: merciless it moves in its orbit. Unjust in its heart against all that shines, cold against sunsthus moves every sun. The suns fly like a storm in their orbits: that is their motion. They follow their inexorable will: that is their coldness. Oh, it is only you, you dark ones, you nocturnal ones, who create warmth out of that which shines. It is only you who drink milk and refreshment out of the udders of light Alas, ice is all around me, my hand is burned by the icy. Alas, thirst is within me that languishes after your thirst. Night has come: alas, that I must be light! And thirst for the nocturnal! And loneliness! Night has come: now my craving breaks out of me like a well; to speak I crave. Night has come; now all fountains speak more loudly. And my soul too is a fountain. Night has come; now all the songs of lovers awaken. And my soul too is the song of a lover. Thus sang Zarathustra.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Penguin, 1966), pp. 105-107.

2. The Joyful Science, Friedrich Nietzsche As our single preparation for the main task of that seminar, Parkes had us read this text, and I guess it was my real introduction to Nietzsche. Well, I had read a little of Nietzsche as an undergraduate in Memphis, in a 19th Century Philosophy course as an undergraduate. But all we read was an obscure early text, "The Use and Abuse of History," and it didn't give me any real idea of Nietzsche's thought. I think I had the stereotypical misunderstanding of Nietzsche as a dark, nihilistic philosopher, and thus when I read this book I was suitably blown away. A couple of years earlier I had written an MA thesis at Memphis on the topic of overcoming the lovesickness of philosophy (as the word "philosophy" literally means the "love of wisdom"). I had come to the conclusion that the history of Western philosophy exhibited various symptoms of lovesickness. When I read this book I was stunned to realize that Nietzsche was working through the same themes. There are many well known aphorisms from this book, aphorisms where the "death of God," the notion of "amor fati", the "eternal recurrence" are introduced. But I'll submit this not very well known passage, where we find the theme of overcoming lovesickness:

The things people call love. Avarice and love: what different feelings these two terms evoke! Nevertheless it could be the same instinct that has two names once deprecated by those who have, in whom the instinct has calmed down to some extent, and who are afraid for their "possessions,' and the other time seen from the point of view of those who are not satisfied but still thirsty and who therefore glorify the instinct as "good." Our love of our neighbor is it not a lust for new possessions? And likewise our love of knowledge, of truth, and altogether any lust for what is new? Gradually we become tired of the old, of what we safely possess, and we stretch out our hands again. Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some more distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession. Our pleasure in ourselves tries to maintain itself by again and again changing something new into ourselves; that is what possession means. To become tired of some possession means tiring of ourselves. (One can also suffer of an excess the lust to throw away or to distribute can also assume the honorary name of "love.") When we see somebody suffer, we like to exploit this opportunity to take possession of him; those who become his benefactors and pity him, for example, do this and call the lust for a new possession that he awakens in them "love"; and the pleasure they feel is comparable to that aroused by the prospect of a new conquest. Sexual love betrays itself most clearly as a lust for possession: the lover desires unconditional and sole possession of the person for whom he longs; he desires equally unconditional power over the soul and over the body of the beloved; he alone wants to be loved and desires to live and rule in the other soul as supreme and supremely desirable. If one considers that this means nothing less than excluding the whole world from a precious good, from happiness and enjoyment; if one considers that the lover aims at the impoverishment and deprivation of all competitors and would like to become the dragon guarding his golden hoard as the most inconsiderate and selfish of all "conquerors" and exploiters; if one considers, finally, that to the lover himself the whole rest of the world appears indifferent, pale, and worthless, and he is prepared to make any sacrifice, to disturb any order, to subordinate all other interests then one comes to feel genuine amazement that this wild avarice and injustice of sexual love has been glorified and deified so much in all ages indeed, that this love has furnished the concept of love as the opposite of egoism while it actually may be the most ingenuous expression of egoism. At this point linguistic usage has evidently been formed by those who did not possess but desired. Probably, there have always been too many of these. Those to whom much possession and satiety were granted in this area have occasionally made some casual remark about "the raging demon," as that most gracious and beloved of all Athenians, Sophocles, did; but Eros has always laughed at such blasphemers; they were invariably his greatest favorites. Here and there on earth we may encounter a kind of continuation of love in which this possessive craving of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and lust for possessiona shared higher thirst for an ideal above then. But who knows such love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 14.

3. The Joy of Man's Desiring, Jean Giono This beautiful book is likely the least known on this list. The original text Que ma Joie Demeure was written in 1935. I only read the translation published by North Point in 1980 but now that I am reminded of it I want to order the French text and try to read that. I came across this book at some point in 1984 and loved it. From its opening line to its end I loved this book. I didn't know it then, but Giono had obviously read Nietzsche. Employing the imagery from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Giono's protagonist is struck down by a lightning bolt at the end. Its protagonist is a kind of Nietzschean bermensch, or even perhaps a Daoist hero, like the wise sage Zhuangzi describes as one who "makes it be spring with everything" around him. This stranger comes into the town and somehow magically transforms everyone around him. That the woman he falls in love with is named Aurore made it all so appropriate at that time. Here is the opening of the book:
It was an extraordinary night. The wind had been blowing; it has ceased, and the stars had sprouted like weeds. They were in tufts with roots of gold, full-blown, sunk into the darkness and raising shining masses of night. Jourdan could not sleep. He turned and tossed. "The night is wonderfully bright," he said to himself. He had never seen the like before. The sky was vibrating like a sheet of metal. You could not tell what made it do so because all was still, even the tiniest willow twig. It was not the wind. It was simply that the sky came down and touched the earth, raked the plains, struck the mountains, and made the corridors of the forests ring. Then it rose once more to the far heights. [ . . .] He opened the stable door. It gave directly onto the fields. When the light of the night was seen like that, without a pane of glass between, one suddenly realized its purity, one perceived that the light of the lantern, with its kerosene, was dirty, and that its blood was choked with soot. No moon, oh, no moon! But it was though one were beneath the glowing embers, in spite of the onset of winter and the cold. The sky smelt of ashes. It had the odour of almond bark and of the dry forest. Jourdan thought that this was the moment to use the new metal plough. Its limbs still wore the bright blue of the last fair; it smelt of the store but it had a willing look. This was the time to use it if ever there was one. The horse was awake. She had come to the door to look out. There are on the earth moments of great beauty and peace. "If he really is to come," said Jourdan to himself, "he will arrive on a night like this." [ . . .] One of those. That is what was needed. A man with a heart always aglow. [. . .]
Jean Giono, Joy of Man's Desiring, trans. Katherine Allen Clarke (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1980), pp. 3-10.

4. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller A searing book of lovesickness if there ever was one...this book was also a profound one for me in 83-84. One long quote and I will say nothing more:
"My world of human beings had perished; I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort. Passing under the viaduct along the Rue Broca, one night after I had been informed that Mona was ill and starving, I suddenly recalled that it was here in the squalor and gloom of this sunken street, terrorized perhaps by a premonition of the future, that Mona clung to me and with a quivering voice begged me to promise that I would never leave her, never, no matter what happened. And, only a few days later, I stood on the platform of the Gare St. Lazare and I watched the train pull out, the train that was bearing her away; she was leaning out of the window, just as she had leaned out of the window when I left her in New York, and there was that same, sad, inscrutable smile on her face, that last-minute look which is intended to convey so much, but which is only a mask that is twisted by a vacant smile. Only a few days before, she had clung to me desperately and then something happened, something which is not even clear to me now, and of her own volition she boarded the train and she was looking at me again with that sad, enigmatic smile which baffles me, which is unjust, unnatural, which I distrust with all my soul. And now it is I, standing in the shadow of the viaduct, who reach out for her, who cling to her desperately and there is that same inexplicable smile on her lips, the mask that I have clamped down over my grief. I can stand here and smile vacantly, and no matter how fervid my prayers, no matter how desperate my longing, there is an ocean between us; there she will stay and starve, and here I shall walk from one street to the next, the hot tears scalding my face. It is that sort of cruelty which is embedded in the streets; it is that which stares out from the walls and terrifies us when suddenly we respond to a nameless fear, when suddenly our souls are invaded by a sickening panic. It is that which gives the lampposts their ghoulish twists, which makes them beckon to us and lure us to their strangling grip; it is that which makes certain houses appear like the guardians of secret crimes and their blind windows like the empty sockets of eyes that have seen too much. It is that sort of thing, written into the human physiognomy of the streets which makes me flee when overhead I suddenly see inscribed "Impasse Satan." That which makes me shudder when at the very entrance to the Mosque I observe that it is written: "Mondays and Thursday tuberculosis; Wednesdays and Fridays syphilis." In every Metro station there are ginning skulls that greet you with "Dfendez-vous contre la syphilis!" Wherever there are walls, there are posters with bright venomous crabs heralding the approach of cancer. No matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is cancer and syphilis. It is written in the sky; it flames and dances, like an evil portent. It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon."
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (New York: Grove Press, 1961), pp. 166-67.

5. Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac I had this book for many years before finally getting around to reading it in the late 90's while living in the mountains of Mendocino. By then I had read alot of Buddhist texts, the early discourses, Mahayana sutras, Dogen's Sh!b!genz! and various commentaries on Zen, but to me this scene still stands out and has stuck with me the most, this scene from the unenlightened Kerouac, in this book where Ray (the Kerouac character) and Japhy Ryder attempt to climb a mountain:! !
"Hurry it up," yelled Japhy from a hundred feet ahead. "It's getting awfully late." I looked up to the peak. It was right there, I'd be there in five minutes. "Only a half-hour to go!" yelled Japhy. I didn't believe it. In five minutes of scrambling angrily upward I fell down and looked up and it was still just as far away. What I didn't like about that peak-top was that the clouds of all the world were blowing right through it like fog.! "Wouldn't see anything up there anyway," I muttered. "Oh why did I ever let myself into this?" Japhy was way ahead of my now, he'd left the peanuts and raisins with me, it was with a kind of lonely solemnity now he had decided to rush to the top if it killed him. He didn't sit down any more. Soon he was a whole football field, a hundred yards ahead of me, getting smaller. I looked back and like Lot's wife that did it. "This is too high!" I yelled to Japhy in panic. He didn't hear me. I raced a few more feet up and fell exhausted on my belly, slipping back just a little. "This is too high!" I yelled. I was really scared. Supposing I'd start to slip back for good, these screes might start sliding any time anyway. That damn mountain goat Japhy, I could see him jumping through the foggy air up ahead from rock to rock, up, up, just the flash of his boot bottoms. "How can I keep up with a maniac like that?" But with nutty desperation I followed him. Finally, I came to a kind of ledge where I could sit at a level angle instead of having to cling not to slip, and I nudged my whole body inside the ledge just to hold me there tight, so the wind would not dislodge me, and I looked down and around and I had had it. "I'm staying here!" I yelled to Japhy.! "Come on Smith, only another five minutes. I only got a hundred feet to go!"! "I'm staying right here! It's too high!" ! He said nothing and went on. I saw him collapse and pant and get up and make his run again.! I nudged myself closer into the ledge and closed my eyes and thought: "Oh what a life this is, why do we have to be born in the first place, and only so we can have our poor gentle flesh laid out to such impossible horrors as huge mountains and rock and empty space," and with horror I remembered the famous Zen saying, "When you get to the top of the mountain, keep climbing." The saying made my hair stand on end; it had been such cute poetry sitting on Alvah's straw mats. Now it was enough to make my heart pound and my heart bleed from being born at all. "In fact when Japhy gets to the top of that crag he will keep climbing, the way the wind's blowing. Well this old philosopher is staying right here," and I closed my eyes. "Besides," I thought, "rest and be kind, you don't have to prove anything." Suddenly I heard a beautiful broken yodel of a strange musical and mystical intensity in the wind, and looked up, and it was Japhy standing on top of Matterhorn peak letting out his triumphant mountain-conquering Buddha Mountain Smashing song of joy. It was beautiful. It was funny, too, up here on the no-so-funny top of California and in all that rushing fog. But I had to hand it to

him, the gusts, the endurance, the sweat, and now the crazy human singing: whipped cream on top of ice cream. I didn't have enough strength to answer his yodel. He ran around up there and went out of sight to investigate the little flat top of some kind (he said) that ran a few feet west and then dropped sheer back down maybe as far as I care to the sawdust floors of Virginia City. It was insane. I could hear him yelling at me but I just nudged farther in my protective nook, trembling. I looked down at the small lake where Morley was lying on his back with a blade of grass in his mouth and said out loud "Now there's the karma of these three men here: Japhy Ryder gets to his triumphant mountaintop and make it, I almost make it and have to give up and huddle in a bloody cave, but the smartest of them all is that poet's poet lyin down there with his knees crossed to the sky chewing on a flower dreaming by a gurgling plage, godammit they'll never get me up here again." !

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums. (New York: Signet, 1958), pp. 66-68.

6. Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon It took the whole summer of 89 to get through this postmodern classic. The story takes place during the darks days of WW II and its immediate aftermath, and yet it is often utterly hilarious, with Pynchon's penchant for funny names and absurdly ridiculous situations. But mostly, it's on this list simply because of the writing. Like the film Gravity, which I recently saw in 3d and experienced as the most powerful cinematic experience to watch since initially seeing Star Wars when it first came out, this book was a stunning experience just to read, its jaw-dropping sentences sometimes going on for pages at a time not relaxing for a moment their tenacious grip. It would be hard to find a better passage than the famous opening scene, in which Pynchon's writing grabbed me from the start without letting go until the end. This opening scene makes clear at the outset the meaning of the title of the book. The whole opening scene can be found here: http://www.english.txstate.edu/cohen_p/postmodern/Literature/Openings/Pynchon.html I won't cite all of it here, but I begin at the beginning and then make several cuts to get the end:
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall--soon--it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing. [. . .] They have begun to move. They pass in line, out of the main station, out of downtown, and begin pushing into older and more desolate parts of the city. Is this the way out? Faces turn to the windows, but no one dares ask, not out loud. Rain comes down. No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting intothey go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete that

only looked like loops of an underpass . . . certain trestles of blackened wood have moved slowly by overhead, and the smells begun of coal from days far to the past, smells of naphtha winters, of Sundays when no traffic came through, of the coral-like and mysteriously vital growth, around the blind curves and out the lonely spurs, a sour smell of rolling-stock absence, of maturing rust, developing through those emptying days brilliant and deep, especially at dawn, with blue shadows to seal its passage, to try to bring events to Absolute Zero . . . and it is poorer the deeper they go . . . ruinous secret cities of poor, places whose names he has never heard . . . the walls break down, the roofs get fewer and so do the chances for light. The road, which ought to be opening out into a broader highway, instead has been getting narrower, more broken, cornering tighter and tighter until all at once, much too soon, they are under the final arch brakes grab and spring terribly. It is a judgment from which there is no appeal. [. . .] His name is Capt. Geoffrey ("Pirate") Prentice. He is wrapped in a thick blanket, a tartan of orange, rust, and scarlet. His skull feels made of metal. [. . .] Pirate has become famous for his Banana Breakfasts. Messmates throng here from all over England, even some who are allergic or outright hostile to bananas, just to watchfor the politics of bacteria, the soil's stringing of rings and chains in nets only God can tell the meshes of, have seen the fruit thrive often to lengths of a foot and a half, yes amazing but true. Pirate in the lavatory stands pissing, without a thought in his head. Then he threads himself into a wool robe he wears inside out so as to keep his cigarette pocket hidden, not that this works too well, and circling the warm bodies of friends makes his way to French windows slides outside into the cold, groans as it hits the fillings in his teeth climbs a spiral ladder ringing to the roof garden and stands for a bit watching the river. The sun is still below the horizon. The day feels like rain, but for now the air is uncommonly clear. The great power station, and the gasworks beyond, stand precisely: crystals grown in morning's beaker, stacks, vents, towers, plumbing, gnarled emissions of steam and smoke. . . . "Hhahh," Pirate in a voiceless roar watching his breath slip away over the parapets, "hhaahhh!" Rooftops dance in the morning. His giant bananas cluster, radiant yellow, humid green. His companions below dream drooling of a Banana Breakfast. This well-scrubbed day ought to be no worse than any Will it? Far to the east, down in the pink sky, something has just sparked, very brightly. A new star, nothing less noticeable. He leans on the parapet to watch. The brilliant point has already become a short vertical white line. It must be somewhere out over the North Sea . . . at least that far ... icefields below and a cold smear of sun.... What is it? Nothing like this ever happens. But Pirate knows it, after all. He has seen it in a film, just in the last fortnight . . . it's a vapor trail. Already a finger's width higher now. But not from an airplane. Airplanes are not launched vertically. This is the new, and still Most Secret, German rocket bomb. "Incoming mail." Did he whisper that, or only think it? He tightens the ragged belt of his robe. Well, the range of these things is supposed to be over 200 miles. You can't see a vapor trail 200 miles, now, can you. Oh. Oh, yes: around the curve of the Earth, farther east, the sun over there, just risen over in Holland, is striking the rocket's exhaust, drops and crystals, making them blaze clear across the sea....

The white line, abruptly, has stopped its climb. That would be fuel cutoff, end of burning, what's their word . . . Brennschluss. We don't have one. Or else it's classified. The bottom of the line, the original star has already begun to vanish in red daybreak. But the rocket will be here before Pirate sees the sun rise. The trail, smudged, slightly torn in two or three directions, hangs in the sky. Already the rocket, gone pure ballistic, has risen higher. But invisible now. Oughtn't he to be doing something . . . get on to the operations room at Stanmore, they must have it on the Channel radars-no: no time, really. Less than five minutes Hague to here (the time it takes to walk down to the teashop on the corner . . . for light from the sun to reach the planet of love . . . no time at all). Run out in the street? Warn the others? Pick bananas. He trudges through black compost in to the hothouse. He feels he's about to shit. The missile, sixty miles high, must be coming up on the peak of its trajectory by now . . . beginning its fall . . . now. . . . Trusswork is pierced by daylight, milky panes beam beneficently down. How could there be a wintereven this one--gray enough to age this iron that can sing in the wind, or cloud these windows that open into another season, however falsely preserved? Pirate looks at his watch. Nothing registers. The pores of his face are prickling. Emptying his minda Commando trickhe steps into the wet heat of his bananery, sets about picking the ripest and the best, holding up the skirt of his robe to drop them in. Allowing himself to count only bananas, moving barelegged among the pendulous bunches, among these yellow chandeliers, this tropical twilight.... Out into the winter again. The contrail is gone entirely from the sky. Pirate's sweat lies on his skin almost as cold as ice. He takes some time lighting a cigarette. He won't hear the thing come in. It travels faster than the speed of sound. The first news you get of it is the blast. Then, if you're still around, you hear the sound of it coming in. What if it should hit exactlyahh, nofor a split second you'd have to feel the very point, with the terrible mass above, strike the top of the skull.... Pirate hunches his shoulders, bearing his bananas down the corkscrew ladder.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), pp. 3-8.

7. Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse As an undergraduate student in philosophy in the late 70s I went through a phase when I think I read most of the Hesse novels, beginning with Siddhartha, and Journey to the East, and culminating with Magister Ludi (or The Glass Bead Game). But the one that stuck with me most was probably Steppenwolf. I had no idea at the time how much Hesse was influenced by Nietzsche and thus how many of his protagonists where essentially Nietzschean characters, including the ones in Siddhartha, Magister Ludi and Steppenwolf. Here is a scene in which the central character is about to speak to his love about his little treatise on the Steppenwolf:
The scene that had gone before became more and more unreal. I was less and less able to believe that these were the same eyes that a moment before had been fixed in a dread obsession. But in this Hermine was like life itself, one moment succeeding to the next and not one to be foreseen. Now she was eating, and the duck and the salad, the sweet and the liqueur were the important thing, and each time the plates were changed a new chapter began. Yet though she played at being a child she had seen through me completely, and though she made me her pupil there and then in the game of living for each fleeting moment, she seemed to know more of life than is known to the wisest of the wise. It might be the highest wisdom or the merest artlessness. It is certain in any case that life is quite disarmed by the gift to live so entirely in the present, to treasure with such eager care every flower by the wayside and the light that plays on every passing moment. Was I to believe that this happy child with her hearty appetite and the air of a gourmet was at the same time a victim of hysterical visions who wished to die? or a careful and calculating woman who, unmoved herself, had the conscious intention of making me her lover and her slave? I could not believe it. No, her surrender to the moment was so simple and complete that the fleeting shadows and agitation to the very depths of the soul came to her no less than every pleasurable impulse and were lived as fully.
Hermann, Hesse, Steppenwolf, trans. Basil Creighton (New York: Bantom Books, 1969), p. 128.

8. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig I think I first read this in 1976 and it became immensely important for me throughout my undergraduate years as I was first becoming a student of philosophy. I think since then I have always wanted to write something like this, a book combining personal narrative and philosophical reflection. I still haven't given up on the idea. I haven't opened this book in many, many years, but when I open it now I find this passage highlighted from all those years ago:
Let's consider a reevaluation of the situation in which we assume that the stuckness now occurring, the zero of consciousness, isn't the worst of all possible situations, but the best possible situation you could be in. After all, it's exactly this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so much trouble to induce; through koans, deep breathing, sitting still and the like. Your mind is empty, you have a "hollowflexible" attitude of "beginner's mind." You're right at the end of the train of

knowledge, at the track of reality itself. Consider, for a change, that this is a moment to be not feared but cultivated. If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas.
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), p. 279.

9. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein Now this book I must have read one summer while still in high school. I remember reading it while our family was on its annual summer vacation trip to Michigan where both my parents were from. I remember the book having a profound impact on me at the time. In the story a human raised on Mars in an advanced civilization returns to Earth to teach a new philosophy, a new way of being. What stuck with me most over the years was the term grok, which Heinlein had coined and which was explained as follows: "Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observedto merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and scienceand it means as little to us (because of our Earthling assumptions) as color means to a blind man." When I peruse the book now, I am a bit stunned to see so many things that might be considered harbingers of my future philosophical journey. At one point, the stranger explains the concept of God as the "one who groks" and then he goes on to explain the Martian concept of life as "Thou art God" which he admits is a bad translation. Of course, this might be understood as a translation of the central concept of the Upanishads, which I would read much, much later in life. I find another passage where the Nietzschean opposition of Apollonian and Dionysian is explained (324). One of the central characters among the stranger's friends is named Dawn and he begin a song with the line "Ardent is our lovely Dawn." The stranger explains to his friends "We humans have something that my former people don't even dream of. I must tell you how precious it is . . . how especially precious I know it to be, because I have known what it is not to have it. The blessing of being male and female" (341). Another character later explains, in one of the famous lines from the text: "'Love' is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own" (345).
Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (New York: Berkeley Medallion Books, 1961).

10. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee I must have been about 10 or 12 when I read this book, and I cannot remember if I read it before seeing the movie or after, but I do remember reading the book had a powerful impact on me. Here is the end of the book. The last line has stuck with me ever since.
I ran up the steps and into the house. Aunt Alexandra had gone to bed, and Atticuss room was dark. I would see if Jem might be reviving. Atticus was in Jems room, sitting by his bed. He was reading a book. Is Jem awake yet?

Sleeping peacefully. He wont be awake until morning. Oh. Are you sittin up with him? Just for an hour or so. Go to bed, Scout. Youve had a long day. Well, I think Ill stay with you for a while. Suit yourself, said Atticus. It must have been after midnight, and I was puzzled by his amiable acquiescence. He was shrewder than I, however: the moment I sat down I began to feel sleepy. Whatcha readin? I asked. Atticus turned the book over. Something of Jems. Called The Gray Ghost. I was suddenly awake. Whyd you get that one? Honey, I dont know. Just picked it up. One of the few things I havent read, he said pointedly. Read it out loud, please, Atticus. Its real scary. No, he said. Youve had enough scaring for a while. This is too Atticus, I wasnt scared. He raised his eyebrows, and I protested: Leastways not till I started telling Mr. Tate about it. Jem wasnt scared. Asked him and he said he wasnt. Besides, nothins real scary except in books. Atticus opened his mouth to say something, but shut it again. He took his thumb from the middle of the book and turned back to the first page. I moved over and leaned my head against his knee. Hrm, he said. The Gray Ghost, by Seckatary Hawkins. Chapter One... I willed myself to stay awake, but the rain was so soft and the room was so warm and his voice was so deep and his knee was so snug that I slept. Seconds later, it seemed, his shoe was gently nudging my ribs. He lifted me to my feet and walked me to my room. Heard every word you said, I muttered. ...wasnt sleep at all, s about a ship an Three-Fingered Fred n Stoners Boy.... He unhooked my overalls, leaned me against him, and pulled them off. He held me up with one hand and reached for my pajamas with the other. Yeah, an they all thought it was Stoners Boy messin up their clubhouse an throwin ink all over it an... He guided me to the bed and sat me down. He lifted my legs and put me under the cover. An they chased him n never could catch him cause they didnt know what he looked like, an Atticus, when they finally saw him, why he hadnt done any of those things... Atticus, he was real nice.... His hands were under my chin, pulling up the cover, tucking it around me. Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them. He turned out the light and went into Jems room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning!""
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (New York: Hachette Book Group, 1960), p. 375-376.