Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggeis Rilke's major prose work and was one of the earliest publications to introduce him to American readers. The very wide audience which Rilke's work commands today will welcome the reissue in paperback of this extremely perceptive translation of the Notebooksby M. D. Herter Norton. A masterly translation of one of the first great modernist novels by one of the German language's greatest poets, in which a young man named Malte Laurids Brigge lives in a cheap room in Paris while his belongings rot in storage. Every person he sees seems to carry their death within them and with little but a library card to distinguish him from the city's untouchables, he thinks of the deaths, and ghosts, of his aristocratic family, of which he is the sole living descendant. Suffused with passages of lyrical brilliance, Rilke's semi-autobiographical novel is a moving and powerful coming-of-age story.
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- I wonder how Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian compares to A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
Otherwise, if anyone is looking for other recommendations for summer reading:
- Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky
- When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D. Yalom
- The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke
- Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon)
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Rilke)
The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (Hobsbawm)
Bhagavad Gita
Upanishads
Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders (Whyte)
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein)
edit: added 2 more & author names
- To summarize, Ted's main point is that man has been alienated from our "true nature" as a result of industrialization, and this is making us sad. He argues that we should leave the harmful industrialized world, and return to nature, which is exactly what he did in a cabin in Montana.
This specific style of anti-modernity (industrialization leads to alienation) is at least as old as Rilke[1], who wrote about it extensively in his 1910 book, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge[2], and I get a chuckle thinking to myself that this is the most viable path to a truly "post-modern" world devoid of modernity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Maria_Rilke [2] https://archive.org/stream/TheNotebooksOfMalteLauridsBrigge/...
