I have been speding some time on the /lit/ board on 4chan. This was perhaps driven by the realization that I might be spending too much of my attention on content that is not conducive to constructive mental development. I had been scrolling through endless horrible content on other parts of that page looking for information about the latest developments in Ukraine, and had ended up exchanging my attention, a precious currency, on information that perhaps was satisfying an anxiety driven curiosity, but also kept my mind focused on a great tragedy. I justified this in part with the idea that it is morally right to keep at least some of your focus on the suffering of the world. But is that a fact in this case, when there is nothing I can do?
While scrolling through /lit/, which is actually a relatively interesting and constructive place on the internet, I found people discussing religion, literature and philosophy. In particular, a thread about Adi Shankara and Advaita seemed to open many old doors in my mind. Since then, I have been regularly thinking about philosophy. I have been trying to recount what I know, rediscovering many thoughts and thinkers that I have been previously interested in. I have also resumed the perhaps never-ending task of collecting more information, structuring more of what I know, and gathering more faces in the person-gallery of philosophers that have thought interesting things.
While it is interesting, comforting and self-constructive to audit and resupply the thought-library, and that this vault might still be the only place that something like this would be possible, I keep thinking that it would be a good project to try and communicate the shape and form of this library in words. I am not sure who would be the audience of this project, what level of quality I would be able to achieve, or whether a work like this would be clarifying or confusing to anyone else reading it. I think perhaps the best I could hope for would be a work with many references and personal impressions of these references, that would at least guide a motivated reader towards some of my own hard-learned insights.
Why not start here? I could try to sketch a map of the philosophers and philosophies that I know, using some arbitrary dimensions. I could also try to write freely, without artificial ordering. I think it would be very difficult to find a structure that I would be content with, at before having written out much of what I would want to fill that structure with. After all, I am free to do this in any way that I want, since I am only writing to attempt to structure and examine the mental labyrinth. There are many interesting paths to take, filled with memory objects from past thinking and reading, especially from when I was studying and had lots of time and attention to spend.
The next step is to write a page on Søren Kierkegård, which I think would be a natural starting point since he was the first philosopher I read seriously, and which influenced my life and thinking (that I am willing to disclose).