
I see that this is the seventh post to mention Faust to date. He’s the man who wanted to be omnipotent and sold his soul to Satan to know as much as God knew.
Even AI doesn’t know everything…..yet. Even before I knew there was going to be artificial intelligence I was interested in HI…Aich I. Harry’s Intelligence. I was going to get as close to Faust without bargaining away my soul……Midas wanted gold, Trump wanted power. As they say whom the God’s wish to punish they grant them their wishes. Or in this case it was Satan.
The tall bookcase is my reference book bookcase. Today there is Google but back even before I was collecting books about everything under the sun I started amassing reference books. The two on the desk in front of the bookcase have short personal stories attached to them. Isaac Asimov was a polymath who wrote something over 300 published books. He was a physicist by training and he loved history. When I decided to learn the whole worlds history I read his series at the junior high school level (as a 20 something) of world history in different eras. I recommend then to anyone interested in getting a fairly quick grasp of a lot of western history. I had to get African, Indian and Asian history elsewhere.
The particular book on the table is Asimov’s encyclopedia of the most important scientist/inventors organized by date of birth as I recall. I paged through this many times and it is full of connections when one scientist or thinker said something or did something to affect another scientist on the book the connection is mentioned. It was hyperlinking before the computer age and a more massive collection than the very cool series by ????? called Connections.
Asimov also wrote a lot of science fiction. Perhaps the most influential was a series about the rules for Robots……which in the day and age of Musk, Zuck and Bezos are pretty much tossed out of circulation. His three part series with a character called Harry something who ran the universe was pretty cool too. It was modeled on the Roman Empire and, of course, it will be ten thousand years before human kind will creep into the next few nearby solar systems probably in the form of Robots.
The other book is one I found at a library sale. It is one of a half dozen books I have about the great literature of the western world. I started to read it from the beginning but didn’t get very far. My yellowed bookmark is on page 50 of about 500 pages. The fellow was a commie sympathizer in the thirties and when Claudia and I went to London in the 1980’s we watched a play about a detective that had been running for decades. I was captivated to watch it pour rain in the first Act. I noticed the playwright was J.B. Priestley and realized I owned his book. He was really far more of a humanitarian than a commie.
You can’t see the about 80 paperback books I spread out on the floor which I organized by subject. I restacked them here.
My photo won’t load……
