I finished Orientalism today, and it was truly unexpected that I would have. I was plodding along with the book as usual, maybe spending just a little bit of extra time. As I reached page 323 out of 378, fully expecting that the whole project would last much longer, I was shocked as I realized that everything beyond 327 was just page after page of references and indices for more than a hundred different citations, and ream after ream of definitions. Towards the end, it was, to say the very least, a strange anti-climax.

For better or for worse, I had somehow finished reading one of the grandest intellectual projects of the entire 20th century – Few books would make me reflect in this way or should give me a sense that I had learned something new that I considered worth passing on, but I am proud to say that Orientalism was one of those books. I talked about this in the last post, but it is strange to think about how we represent others, how those representations can be fair or foul, how they can distort our understanding of the world. I think that insight will go with me for much longer and it will always play a role in setting a small precursor check before I view or understand situations. 

I find myself now in a strange place, thinking about the different things there are to read ahead. The things I didn’t mention I was reading, even as I had neglected to mention the fact that I am right now in the middle of one of those flights of fancy, which I take once in a while, as I try to gain a certain mastery or understanding of the world, which I had not had before. 

The feeling doesn’t come all the time, but when it does come, it is quite intense, and here I am caught in the thick of it, looking at title after title from sociological tract after sociological tract. 

The old familiar names like Durkheim, Weber, Foucault, and Fanon are casually appearing, and the somewhat newer names like Manheim are mixing together with some old and vaguely familiar but perhaps never truly encountered ones like Adorno, Saussure, Heidegger, Kant, Nussbaum, and Levi Strauss, amongst others. Even as I mentally determined that the next book I will read is Homi K. Bhabha’s “The Location of Culture”. 

I don’t quite know when this phase will end, but what I do know is that the last time this happened, it continued for an entire year. 

I appeared in a newspaper that year after having read 350 books in a single year. 

I think it is unlikely that I will achieve that record again, because the books that I am looking up are much burn out. 

The ideas are more complex, the terms on which to compare reality with the visible sight that life has accorded now are of a higher resolution, and in my subjective evaluation, therefore requiring more depth, time, and apprehension along the winding garden paths.

To give you an idea of what that means, from Orientalism alone I started up at least 40 separate ChatGPT conversations just to understand what Said was talking about, learning words that I had not encountered before across multiple languages, to not even speak about English alone: 

I discovered again sociology of knowledge, location, subjectivities, and so many other things in new lights that have made me much more deeply think about the realities that we find ourselves in and how we create those. Professor Said has been a wonderful source of instruction in this regard, and his legacy, I think, does not need my validation, though today’s appreciation is not a paean – it is just a simple note of appreciation. 

Where will this take me and what will I eventually learn from it? It is hard to say, but from what I’ve seen, it never really is in the direction of something bad. I don’t really think in terms of good or bad. It just all seems natural, per the towers injunction that is in my WhatsApp status message for anyone who happens to know my phone number. 

Anyway, every story has an end, but this one seems to be being written, so I will not interrupt it.