Our Journey, Day 88

I'm not 100% sure how the Index of Keywords from The Syntopicon that I’m transcribing into Obsidian is going to be useful. I think it will be interesting as a guide to what some intelligent and committed people in the middle of the 20th century thought was important in the Western Cultural Tradition. It's not going to be a very rapid process, if I decide to read all the Great Books. The timeline the editors recommended was ten years. If I recall, that assumed people would read about eighteen works in a year. The organization of the readings was apparently designed to "ease into" the content, rather than going strictly by chronology as the books themselves do.

I'll probably be able to transcribe about two letters of the alphabet daily. I have just shifted all the 102 Categories to all caps in Obsidian, so I'll know when I'm looking at one of them rather than just a keyword with a lot of links. There are some duplications between my regular vault and the "Syntopicon" folder that lives in it, such as "Evolution". I'll have to reconcile those sometime, I suppose. But not until I export the complete version of the Syntopicon in its own file.

Before I embark on a full reading of all the Great Books (this seems like more of a retirement project than something I'll be able to do while holding a full-time job), I plan to try some syntopical reading. Probably beginning with the category of HISTORY, since that's something I know a bit about and where I'll be able to assess the quality of the argument and evidence. I think it's interesting to look at history as a sort of special case in "self-learning", because in addition to the skills that other types of reading provide, history (like science) "sets the scene" and provides background information on the world that people use to orient themselves in it. So I may lean a little more into that, as I develop this new blog.