Yes, even this thought of being unoriginal is highly unoriginal. But since noticing that a stupefying amount of what I know has been gleaned from books I encountered (as opposed to, say, wise sages I had the fortune to meet in the flesh and bone), I shall call these sort of knowledge "borrowed wisdom."
Not that there is anything wrong with having highly unoriginal thoughts. Learning from what others before us had to toil earnestly to come to know and learn to articulate, is said to enable this generation's fool to surpass the genius wisdom of the last.
The arduous task, therefore, is to retrace the roots of borrowed wisdom, and making intelligent connections between them. This form of synthesis also allows a more cogent aggregation of ideas, a process that lends texture and context through drawing connections. Likewise, there are those (e.g. researchers and academics) that spend their entire lives working on one specific problem, while there are others who display consilience and find coherence from disparate fields.
I prefer to be identified with the latter for now because more often than not, it requires the exercise of counter intuition.
Do not be misled into thinking that this blog is all about reading or intellectual posturing. Nor should it be construed to be an external appendage or a poor excuse for an ego.
It should be read, first and foremost, as a a personal treatise (like how most good books by erudite authors should be), and then as a tribute to the writers and thinkers whom I have read, and to those lurking on shelves that I have yet to encounter and be surprised by.This makes the challenge quite obvious: It is one thing to stake a claim to knowledge while quite another to present it eloquently and convincingly. In other words, if you can start to think about what others thought about and re-state it in your own terms (provided it is a faithful re-presentation of the original idea), only then can you have a right to own it.
So let's begin to clear the air.
