Sometimes, I get surprised by colleagues and friends who show remarkable flashes of brilliance when discussing things or when drawing conclusions during our discussions. Most of the time, I enjoy intelligent conversation. There are times when I find that being in a conversation is itself given to folly, especially since, discussions with the wrong crowd or the wrong person over a long period of time can lead to a serious deterioration of one’s mental ability. Perhaps this is an observation I make from experience, since my intellectual conversations with friends have reduced significantly as I have grown older, especially starkly, over the last couple of years. It is probably unrelated to the fact that I have been busier these two years than I had been before that, but one’s being preoccupied seldom affects one’s intellectual pursuits, especially given my situation, where I found plenty of time to pursue my hobbies.
Mathematics has become an unusual hobby for me, and strangely, instructive. Inasmuch as I find intellectual fascination in it, I also get intimidated by it as I used to be, at times. The mathematician’s astuteness is based in patience and observation. His astuteness is the foundation of his reading, it is the foundation of his understanding. I stumbled on this delightful essay that illustrates how one should read a book on mathematics, as differentiated from how one reads a more conventional book such as a story or a novel. I am inclined to imagine after reading this, that there are modes of consciousness and more importantly, conscious participation in one’s surroundings. These are distinct and different and perhaps we grow into certain modes rather more easily than others. It was instructive to imagine that one’s temperament influences and is influenced by these ponderings on how to take in situations. Obviously, much of what we can think escapes our linguistic faculty and is retained in our tacit knowledge and our natural languages. Many of these thoughts are left unexpressed, many of these ideas are left unexplored, much intellectual territory undiscovered. The pioneers of our time are visionaries of the mind, so it probably helps my momentary enthusiasm if I were to channel it into that book on Topology and manifolds that has been sitting on my bookshelf for a few months now. Not to mention re-read a couple of chapters of Godel, Escher, Bach. I look forward to the weekend and my vacation next week, when I can spend considerably more time pondering these things.
