Circles in Secunderabad

This morning I woke up wondering; why am I trying to read this complicated book on Skepticism, in the usual dry academic style with a lack of poetry, wondering whether my saturated brain will actually take in any more, knowing that even if I do understand it and take it in to what purpose can I use it? I know damn well I wouldn't be able to express the ideas vocally in meaningful sentence and I think I would also have trouble relating it in writing. It's almost like I have an illness, a belligerent curiosity to know more, understand more, but as always I'm frustrated my my lack of memory and my powers of expression. But then it occurred to me on my journey to work, through the crazed hecticity, heightened energy and smokey dead air of Secunderabad, that regardless of all this, it really is nourishing. Whether you succeed in remembering it, it makes you grow and the journey through Secunderabad itself seemed to add weight to the ideas in the book, like will being the essential essence of all things: you can see it in the scabied starving dogs, lepers without any limbs at all who have to lie down to beg and the trees that stay alive regardless of the carcinogous pollution, which they may enjoy, but I doubt it. Yes, why stay alive when you can die, only because of will, and because the things you read occasionally strike a chord and help you go on and "moments of experiences which take us beyond the practical or scientific perception of the world."

I'm interested in something my friend said about making art in the woods and then destroying it, like the monks who build mandalas for hours and days, gracefully and fastidiously, only to burn them as soon as they are complete. Reading about the mind, about thoughts and dreams is like this, no matter if the ideas vanish, the work has been done in feeding the soul or something like...

Or then maybe I'm divided, maybe too much philosophical thought actually removes you from the truth of nature/nature of truth, like in Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, Siddhartha only really discovers himself and happiness by the sole contemplation of the river, of nature without any intellectual imput from teachers or words. But this is, strangely, almost exactly one of the ideas in the Skepticism book, that nature is experienced at once in it's power of transcending the mind and as being contained in the mind, only the later Romantic poets couldn't find the balance in the end...their minds swallowed nature up, as their belief in the power of the mind becomes stronger. according to the author I can't remember, Anthony Rudd or something.

I don't know if it's just me, but I get a kind of synchronistic reading list while I'm travelling, where it seems that much of what is being said in one book seems to link up to ideas in another, though the books, just arrive in my hands, almost arbitrarily (perhaps). For example in a book I actually brought with me: Visual Magik, by Jan Fries he talks about Shamans realising (or imagining) that what they experience outside is actually only a reflection of the inside. And in Siddhartha also, it seemed to express everything I wanted to say about truth and life at the moment of reading, as books often do, yet I discovered it, with missing spine in a cupboard in a cottage in Mysore. Books seem to arrive at the right time. But I yet again have no real conviction in what I'm saying, my favourite line in the whole of Siddhartha was (quoted incorrectly) "In every truth the opposite is also true," so what can I say, all this is true and the opposite is also true. Do I waste 15 rupees I wonder???