Well I've done it. I've finally broken Amazon's coercive clutch on my shopping habits. I know I've mentioned a few times that I've never been able to visit Amazon.co.uk and stick to my initial list; without fail I've always come away with at least twice as much as I originally intended to buy. Today though that pattern ends. In fact today, for the first time, I actually sought to buy more stuff because I thought that it seemed wasteful to buy just two books. This is silliness though. It would be wasteful to journey six miles in to town to buy two books, but it's not wasteful to visit a website for them.
One of the books I bought was John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty. I think it's the first out-and-out philosophy book I've ever purchased. I don't know if it's going to be the first of many because this is an area I've never really been interested in. I've got to start somewhere though and this was made to sound quite interesting in an online lecture I watched recently.
The other book I bought is one of Sigmund Freud's. It's called The Future of an Illusion. I know I've recently been pretty critical of psychology but it was that, and a recent conversation, which prompted me to buy this.
Mia came over and spent the evening here two days ago. A few times the conversation turned to life at sixth form and we reminisced about what happy times those were. Mia and I met in A-Level psychology and we both share similar experiences of it. She said to me, "Those lessons were such a waste of time. Do you remember how Miss Elvery would spend ages either flirting with Ash, talking about Razorlight or sharing the most boring details of her life?"
I said, "Course I do. I remember once she had been yammering away for about 15 minutes—talking about something completely irrelevant. I looked around and thought to myself 'why is nobody outraged at this?' So I said to her once, I put my hand up and said, 'Is this going to be on the exam? Should we be taking notes?' It was so inappropriate what she was doing."
Mia said, "I remember you asking that. Do you remember what happened next?"
"I don't think I do" I said. "I remember it didn't endear me to her though."
"Well she got really embarrassed" Mia said, "but then she just carried on like nothing had happened. I don't think I learnt anything in that year because she spent most of the time chatting to us."
I replied, "I was exactly the same. Exactly the same. In fact I think that all I learnt in that class was how to identify pop-culture references to the subject and why psychology jokes were funny. 'Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?' for instance. I understand why that's funny thanks to that class, but that's about it."
It's absolutely true that the class was a waste of my time, but I was thinking that it's not something I should be proud of. I don't think it's my fault that my teacher was more interested in making herself popular amongst the students than by educating us, but it would be my fault if I didn't try to do something about it now. I thought I'd start with Freud, since psychologists love him so much. It's tough to pick a starting book though, since he's notorious for being wrong about the majority of the things he has said. That and self-medicating with, and prescribing to patients, cocaine.
We'll see how it goes. It would be nice if these books were both gateways to a larger world I could enjoy learning about. If they are then I expect to fall back in to the past pattern of visiting Amazon and being bullied in to buying books I didn't even know I wanted.
