There are books you hear about as a fan of literature and philosophy and you ask yourself “why did it take me so long to read you my little paperback friend?”

As someone who has a bad habit of buying books at just about every local bookstore I visit, but then also going overboard checking out books from the library, this is why many of my books become neglected. Is there any sort of special help group for this problem?

The thought provoking questions and answers presented in Ishamel by Daniel Quinn had my brain firing on all cylinders and my journal becoming a tome of quotes and my own questions and answers. It is the simplest of all settings and characters to follow; a human enters a room and discovers a giant ape with the ability to communicate with them in order to ask them questions about civilization and the meaning of specific aspects of life. They enjoy the discussion, or is at very least intrigued enough to continue to meet with the gorilla to answer the questions they had been given and to ask some of his own.

I thought it was very impactful to have these questions presented by a non-human creature that lives on the same Earth as humans. To be honest, if it was another human as the “professor” character, I probably would have rolled my eyes and not felt as much of a pull to really consider what they were saying.

A new term discovered that followed me throughout the book and carried over into my day-to-day life when discussing any subjective topics is epistemology. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity and scope. It is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion. In today’s world where we have a ton of information at our fingertips, we still have to be able to filter through it and distinguish the objective vs the subjective to continue to build our knowledge.

Many of the ideas presented challenged not only the human character in the book but also the reader to use epistemology to challenge one’s knowledge about whatever topic was presented. With that being said, below are some dives I took into exploring my own knowledge and some items I am still dealing with the objective and subjective qualities of.

“You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.”

This started the theme of being satisfied. It is very clear that humans are not satisfied with just being. It’s a strange relationship in that most people want to achieve this goal, but we are all much closer than we realize. And if we start to realize it, we immediately believe we are becoming stagnant or need to reinvigorate our lives. We believe there is a linear path to being satisfied and happy, and if we fall off of that path then something is wrong. But often times a detour is a beautiful scenic route to the same destination. Some believe to be limited is evil, but to be comfortable with one’s limitations seems like peace to me.

While the above is more a symbolic representation of the quote, the growing need to be satisfied to the point of overconsumption and a strange competition of the stuff we have is a very literal representation. I will keep this very short as I typically don’t like to get too political in my posts, but the change in climate and the destruction of natural resources for things we don’t necessarily need to live is very clear. Again hearing a gorilla tell the human character was much more impactful.

“If you can’t discover what is keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual.”

“If the will is there, the method will be found.”

This ties into the previous point, but I added a level as not merely looking into your own words and actions, but also those of the people and creatures around you. If you think about an animal first when reading this, as I did since it is a gorilla posing the statements after all, if they are stuck, they get quite crafty in finding a way out. If they need something, they figure out the best method to get it. With animals, these scenarios are typically quite simple, at least to us since the scenarios we are faced with can be quite complicated. What we forget though is that often times we have many options available to us all with different costs and level of reward, and often times also very simple. But again, satisfaction is often times not linear. Rather than an animal in a pickle, we can also watch other humans around us to find out what motivates them or what stage of a path they may be on and how we can be effective in helping them find their happiness. I find myself often saying I want or need something, and when I begin to employ the methods, I realize I may not want or need that thing. Then like Chandler Bing with a couch in hand, I pivot, either to solace of where I am at or to readjusting the will or the method.

“Every generation is somehow new, more thoroughly cut off from the past than the one that came before.”

“We esteem the values and traditions of wiser, nobler ancestors and deplore their disappearance, but we have no intention in living the way those wiser, nobler ones lived.”

It is a cultural amnesia of sorts. We are always told that history has a habit of repeating itself, but is that because we let it be so? It’s interesting today because the gap between generations seems smaller and smaller in what is becoming a smaller world with technology, but we still have this amnesia. Is it that the generations that are closer to us pose a threat to us finding ourselves since their traditions are still in place in our day-to-day lives? We cannot choose which traditions to follow like we can with older traditions, so do we see them as oppressive? Where do we find the balance in keeping tradition alive and being excited for something that is ours? This was one of those areas in the book in which I am still exploring these questions and would love to hear your thoughts as well.

I can say with no hesitation that putting this blog together has exercised my brain in a way I truly love, but also in one that leaves me utterly exhausted. For now, I will give these thoughts a moment to simmer and will happily go go a jigsaw puzzle or play a video game. Or maybe I will hit up my own friend Ishmael (yes a real person), and watch some sports.

Happy reading, gaming, puzzling, or whatever you decide to do with your day.

• Literature