Waiting More Than a Dozen Years

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

How is it that recommending a book lessens the value of what's in that book? Does the content existing in book form make it not valid? Surely you realize the concept existed before it was put in to a book, no?

First, an occurring world, the way the world occurs for you and to you (including the people in it), occurs only through words, only through language. No language, no occurring. That does not mean nothing happens. It just means that without language you have no way to relate to (and to catalog) the world. One reason you can't remember your extremely early childhood...you did not have langauge or enough mastery of it to create your personal catalog of memories. Anything before that is just what someone told you as a story, even if it seems consistent with your memories and experiences.

To paraphrase Rorty (from a book), the fact that the physics of Newton provides a better explanation of the world than that of Aristotle does not mean the world speaks Newtonian. The world does not speak, only we do.

Conversely, the language you use gives you the world you see. A reason, the nearly 12.5 years of a sexless marriage has not torn us apart is because the language I use around it and these related issues does not (by intent) tear the marriage apart. How many people actually grasp that? What I can say, at a personal level, is something has changed for me that has had the nature of my conversation change. Now what does any of this have to do with books?

Books are just a conversation in written form, just as this posting is. In and of themselves, the idea that books can and do contain useful information is not a problem. I have a whole library of books that I've read and given away. I have access to three university libraries as well as our own local library to do nothing but read on this and related topics.

At this stage in my life (I'm 56), I'm less open to the idea that the fix will be found in the pages of some book. As I said elsewhere, to procure fixing through the pages of a book is to suggest that the problem is really a lack of knowledge. Given the volume of information written on and available on relationships alone, you'd think there should be no reason for any complaints ever about people's sex-lives, marriages, communication, etc. Yet, there is. Is that because people just have not found the right book?


If someone wants to share that the were in a similar situation as mine and that some book really does a good job of addressing the situation I've addressed here, because they, too, found that useful by looking at A, B, C, D, in sequence as recommended by a book, I am willing to listen. But to tell me to go buy and read a book does not cut it. Bagheera went a little farther by tryingto tell me that my problem is I'm a nice guy and that is worth some credit. But given what was said about me being a nice guy, would a nice guy be standing his ground and evermore emphatically stating "Wrong diagnosis?"

For example, in SSM I could identify the characteristics of what happened in my first marriage after our son was born. Not only that, but I knew that at the time. It did not keep my wife from taking the position that I had left the marriage and it was just a matter of time before I left her. She "pre-emptively" found herself some college boy 7 years younger than either of us and started her affair. Nothing made a difference (and if you asked her today, as I have recently, nothing would have or could have made any difference at the time). Even if we did it "by the book."

To twist a joke about management into this topic of reading:

The more time you spend reading about the problems of (and cures for) your life, the less time you actually have to tskr the actions to action do something. Stability is achived when you spend all your time reading about the cures for the nothing that you are doing.