After two hectic weeks I thought I should take a good rest and maybe watch football tonight.
But my bookroom is really untidy. I decide to do some clean up and pack up those corporate files and documents so that I can moved them to my office.
See the books on my spare table:
I have to use this mahjong table to place my books as the shelves are full.
And the files have spilled onto the floors too:
And it also spills over and occupy my other table where I kept my printers and facsimile.
After the packing is done, I got some 12 black-bags and a few boxes of documents to moved out of this room by tomorrow.
While packing and stacking, the mahjong table collapsed and broke both its legs; and I lost a mahjong table.
Now I got to buy a new one. I don't play mahjong; I used it as a writing and storage table as it can fold-up easily if I need to.
Now I got to buy a new one. I don't play mahjong; I used it as a writing and storage table as it can fold-up easily if I need to.
11 comments:
Wah lao!!! So many books!!! I don't think I will be able to read all the books here in my life! Geng!
Mav,
Consider parking your non sensitive books in a good library for safekeeping, for maintainence ( from yellowing, silverfish etc) , for people to do research.... etc.
Its also a fire hazard!
A good book needs a good reader. Some of the valuable books can be kept at the reference section and not be lent out.
That will clear out your room and put the mahjong table to its original use - mahjong ;P
Why am I saying this? I unloaded 500 odd books to a local uni and I felt better after that. Try it.
Jefus,
I will take your advice; I will set up a public library.
Purple~Mushroom,
You are only viewing an elevation. There's three more sections.
Wow, too many!
Then again, Nicolas Taleb in his book 'The Black Swan' did mention something relevant on this:
“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encylopedic, insightful, and non-dull.
He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool.
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight read-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly.
Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an anti-library.
We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So this tendency to offend Eco’s library sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People don’t walk around with anti-resumes telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did. Just as we need to stand library logic on its head, we will work on standing knowledge itself on its head. Note that the Black Swan comes from our misunderstanding of the likelihood of surprises, those unread books, because we take what we know a little too seriously.
Let us call this an anti-scholar - someone who focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device - a skeptical empiricist.”
Avatar,
You must have read wide and I'm impressed that you read Nicolas Taleb.
I agree with you. I love my books more than anything else.
Waahh so much books. I'm totally impressed. My collections account to less than half of yours..
Gukita,
I have much more than this; this is just one section of the whole library. However, the books are a collection over the last 15 years. They are a part of my life.
OMG... You're the real bookworm ( I was called that at Primary school).
Btw.. I had this discussion with Adib about what is Knowledge. Knowledge is TRUTH..Absolute..The Real thing.. What we have, read, learnt, concluded is at best just a `perception of knowledge'. True Knowledge reside with The Owner of The Knowledge. Any from human transport is limited to human faculty, hence diminished / confined to human faculties of the 5 senses; hence cannot perceive beyond that...
Gukita,
Knowledge is never the "truth absolute". Knowledge is the transformation of phenomena into an object or matter within the cognitive faculty and then forms the perception into which we digress further to form self-consciousness.
Truth exists merely as intuition till it becomes quite clear as to what its own true nature consists in. Every knowledge depends on grasping and expressing the subject matter, object or things.
Truth is merely the essential nature of reaching a completeness of thoughts through the process of its own development.
Knowledge is only real and can only be set forth as fundamental proposition of philosophy; and even if it is true, it is yet a first principle and can be held as false eventually.
To reach the stage of true knowledge it goes through the process as regards the content and bring to light the forms it will assume in the course of the progress leading to consciousness up to the level of the conception of science itself.
The conscious mind is about cognition and objectivity. Consciousness knows and comprehends nothing but what falls within its experience. The mind is an object to itself and the abstract element of immediacy, that is, of the separation between knowing and the truth.
To know something to be true means that knowledge is adequate and is on equal terms with its substance.
However, since knowing is a faculty of a definite kind with a determine range, without the precise determination of its nature and limits, we might take hold on clouds of errors instead of its truth.
Natural consciousness will prove itself to be only knowledge and not real knowledge.
If we stick to an opinion and prejudice resting on the authority of what others presumed, or upon our own conviction, the differences of the two is merely in the conceit which animates the other. Only skepticism directed to the whole phenomenal consciousness makes the mind qualified to test what is truth.
Skepticism directs the mind to see in the results as pure nothingness, and abstract from the facts that this nothing is determinate and is the nothing of that out of which it comes as a result. It has a content which advance us to take a step further to see whether there is possibly anything new and what that is, in order to cast it into an abysmal void. Once the result is apprehended, a new form immediately arise and in the transition we progress through the forms which comes of itself.
Knowledge which is immediate can be nothing else but immediate knowledge, that is, knowledge of the immediate of what it is. The concrete content which our sense certainty furnishes makes it appear to be the richest kind of knowledge which we traverse its extent in space and time with its content. The bare fact of certainty is but an abstract kind of truth and it merely reveals what the mind regards as what it know as truth in which the truth contains solely the being of the fact it knows, for the things that we are certain, by virtue of its having a multitude of distinct qualities are but replete with possible modes of relation and a variety of connections with other things. Rather, the thing, the fact, the truth, is, and it is merely because it is. And if we look closely and observe with a pure mindset, there will be a good deal more implied in that knowledge which constitutes the kernel of another form of certainty which can be given out to it as another truth.
In perception, we start from a certain stability in the manner of apprehension and a certain constancy in the content apprehended which satisfy the demands of knowledge. We then further analyze to find the universality and general acceptance to determine the way in which the unity of the object holds together its essential differences. The result will show that the unity of the object is only admissible as an unqualified non-sensuous unity. It then transcends sense-apprehension and perception proper and compels the mind to adopt another cognitive attitude in order to apprehend it. Thus we achieved understanding.
Take note that what is discuss exclude self-consciousness as self-consciousness finds its own reality in the pure abstraction of Ego which develops further to form distinction of its own of which it does become an subjective real content for the self.
Consciousness is essentially that which thinks and is a thinking reality, and that anything is essential for consciousness, is true and good, only when consciousness is dealing with it adopts the attitude of a thinking being.
When thinking grasp the living world as a system of thought, there lie a content to supply the sphere of the Ego.
Mave,
This is not for others. I'm replying through email.
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