My dad starts, "There is a store over on Main that makes brass plates for bookshelves. So the question is, what categories do you use to categorize your library."
"Easy," I replied "Literature, Art & Graphic Arts, Politics & History, Social Theory, Religion, Science* & Math, Philosophy and Sifrei Kodesh."
And like that, I realized how simply (re: crudely) I saw the world. Drama is just literature; anthropology, social theory etc. Definitely a worth while exercise.
* by science I "really" mean physics, where biology is just tacked on, the way platypi are kind of like mammals.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
13 years ago
2 comments:
How does religion differ from philosophy (with small aspects of social theory and literature)? Could not Literature and the Arts be combined into one category? I suppose, though, that there's some advantage to marking off some of the larger subdivisions within fields of knowledge, as long as one doesn't end up with too many categories.
Yes, Josh, they could. The point is, in my mind Art and Literature are distinct. Presumably in your mind they are far more similar.
I would ordinarily scoff at putting a book of de Kooning's work in the same section as Anna Karenina, but then one could just as easily condemn me for putting Dosteivsky with Frost.
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