Ah, gentle reader, I just read this book, wherein the just here refers to 2017, the Hot Springs vacation year–I read the author’s Travels with Epicurus when traveling (to Hot Springs, Arkansas), and I borrowed this book from the library later in the year. As to this audiobook version, I picked it up this May because I remembered reading the author, but I didn’t remember this book, per se, but certainly Travels with Epicurus. Since I’m again in the habit of putting in audio courses and audio books in the truck even though I’m only spending thirty minutes in the car several days a week instead of an hour or more every day. It takes me longer to get through them, but I’m getting through them. The odds are far greater that I’ll listen to the two and a half boxes of overstock I have in my closet before I read all the unread books in my library, but the odds of completing either stack are pretty low.
At any rate, to recap, this book (on audiobook) takes a list of quotes that Klein wrote in notebooks from when he was young and then picked it up again later. You know, I might have done something similar in journals, but I remember writing some quotes on index cards and taping them to my monitor. Not so much philosophical quotes–I was mostly an English major, after all. But Klein was not a professor of philosophy; this book alludes to it and his Wikipedia entry seems to confirm that he got his BA in philosophy and then took to writing for television and then some books. So we’re about even on formal education but definitely not on erudition. And the best part of his Wikipedia is the present tense (“Daniel Martin Klein (born 1939 in Wilmington, Delaware) is an American writer of fiction, non-fiction, and humor.”) God bless him, for he has blessed us.
So, yeah, in this book, he quotes something included in his notebook, a quote by an proper Philosopher of some sort, along with some history including the bio a bit of the quoted and then goes into a freewheeling discussion of what he thought about the quote and where it led him. Some relate to previous entries, but not all of them. The book came out before Substacks became popular, but one could imagine each being a Substack post.
Klein is an agnostic who has little truck with formal religion–one of his pithies pretty much attacks Christianity–and some of the things have aged poorly–his utilitarian defense of vaccines, for example, has taken a bit of a hit recently, but he’s never polemic or offensive. He does try to find meaning, and he embraces a lot of Existentialist points of view and the currently (and ever) popular drive to live mindfully in the moment and offers a number of pithies defend that approach.
The book, read by someone other than the author, spans six discs, so six and a half hours of listening over a month or two. Definitely worth my time. And, you know, I borrowed his books from the library, so I don’t own them. And if I can find them in the wild, I will by them and add them to the to-read stacks. Because I like them that much. Maybe I should also keep an eye out for his novels as well, but they’re probably more obscure/requiring of ordering than the philosophy books. Although I see on Abe Books that all of them go for about $5 a paperback which is not bad.
