Bookshelf

“Of the many ideals which in youth gave life a meaning and radiance missing from the chilly perspectives of middle age, one at least has remained with me as bright and satisfying as ever before - the shameless worship of heroes. In an age that would level everything and reverence nothing, I take my stand with Victorian Carlyle, and light my candles, like Mirandola before Plato’s image, at the shrines of great men.”

Will Durant, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

I believe in two kinds of knowledge - formal knowledge and visceral knowledge.

Formal knowledge is acquired from someone else’s formalized understanding of the world - and is often accessible through books, papers, blogs, podcasts, or other forms of media. Visceral knowledge on the other hand is acquired from direct engagement with reality - and often comes at the cost of intellectual, emotional, or even physical pain. Both are necessary.

There are some souls brave enough to take the visceral knowledge of their lives and formalize it - they are my heroes. I believe there is much to learn from them - for what they have to say will likely survive the future, precisely because it has survived the past.

What is in my possession then is much closer to an antilibrary than it is to a library. Books unread outnumber the books read - as what is unknown surpasses whatever little is known. I am always hunting for ideas that endure the test of time - and a litmus test I’ve found useful is whether the ideas in a book are applicable beyond the narrow scope of their respective “domains” - from philosophy and finance to startups and poetry. If you have any recommendations or would like to chat about some of these ideas - please shoot me an email!

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”

Richard Feynman

This is what is currently on my bookshelf. At some point in the future I’ll work on an ML project to extract book titles from images. May the image be worth a thousand words (for now).