Changing the people around you... for the books. Knowing thyself.

In the posthumously published diary by Jan Zabrana is somwhere written: "Changing the people around you for the books... But for how long? And what happiness from it? The only reason for it is that, there is no happiness from anything... And then it is right: changind the people around you for the books."


After I finished reading Orhan Pamuk and his "Black book" (especially the Tale of the Prince) I can just change this a little to: "Changing the people around your for the books, and then throwing all the books away. Only by then you can look into your heart and "know" who you really are." Hopefully you will not end like the Prince, who finally did not have anything on his mind so he really was himself and his last words were: "Nothing."

This reminds me one of the very short article I wrote once about the impossibility of escaping to "read" (in a semiotic sense, where a text is everything, that needs interpreting, or comprehence (it could be anything, painting, TV show, billboard, etc.). So the only escape, I wrote then, is knowing, that there is no escape. This gets me to philosphers who were blinding themselves, but yet what about "reading" the texts, which are created by your mind? The only "escape" of that would be death, as happened to the Prince. And even by some people, the death is not the end to everything... (to tell it right, both groups - people who believe in afterlife, and people who do not, have presented the similarly valid evidence so far).