Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799)

I finished _The Waste Books_ by Lichtenberg. I really like this book. It’s a collection of paragraphs about the world, impressions of someone who sees themselves as part of the Enlightenment, but who feels society bears down on him and others in a way that’s repressive and against the better angels of our nature. His witty questions and answers are like a sieve for approaching the most important questions we face as humans. He prefigures a lot of more modern thought, where we can see traces of things to come, like embodied cognition and pragmatism. But it’s not only philosophical; there are jokes, insults, exasperated sighs, small cries of pain. And for anyone interested in writing, the book is a goldmine of the vicissitudes of that profession: too many books exist, written by people for whom the book is more of a means of personal extension, part of the business of being someone in society, rather than the accumulated evidence of work towards an end honestly and genuinely approached. Most of what he says about his present of the eighteenth century still applies to our present. It’s also a book that can be read in tiny little chunks, like a bathroom reader. I read a little bit of it every morning after waking up. It was like reading a witty letter from a friend trying to bolster me for the day.… (meer)