Since my early 20s, I’ve been building a personal library and reading my way through the world of ideas. This project, Map and Form, is to start to collect, document, and share the insights I’ve gathered from these books, primarily around these emergent and often overlapping themes:
- The history of ideas and the people who thought them
- Traditional Judaism and its intersection with modernity
- The social and intellectual history of the 19th century and the enduring reverberations of ideas from this time
- The history and mechanisms of human innovation and creativity
- How architecture and design shape the way we experience the world
- Insights into the human inner life from biography, memoir, and literature
Rather than trying to outline and analyze the totality of a book, I mostly focus on the novel insights, observations, and reflections within that amaze, challenge, vindicate, or often give language to vague notions already held. They’re frequently not the big ideas, but the small quiet ones, sometimes standing independent of the greater argument or exploration, silently coalescing or colliding with those in other works. I strive to make the connections I discover explicit, iteratively building a modest map of this tacit conversation. This is a living index and so entries will remain undated.
Understanding, as Berlin1 learned from Vico2, that ideas are born in specific societies, with their own cultural logic and assumptions, I try to let ideas stand on their own, and yet I’m confronted with the countervailing impulse to see the unity of all things. In this regard, like Tolstoy, I am a fox who longs to be a hedgehog3.
- Isaiah Berlin, My Intellectual Path in The Power of Ideas, 2nd ed. (Princeton University Press, 2000), 8 ↩︎
- The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. T. G. Bergin & M. H. Fisch, Rev. ed. (Cornell University Press, 1968) ↩︎
- Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, 2nd ed. (Princeton University Press, 2013), 4 ↩︎