After a long time, I feel I'm in a strange loop!!!
The last time I was dwelling in such a loop was when I was reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. This time around, I'm reading Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. In a really, really, really strange loop, indeed! Thanks to a review from a friend of mine about the book in his blog, I happened to read the review of this great book some time back.
I hit Blossoms Book House few weeks back and to my surprise, I'd only a single copy of old edition of the book to buy, which I declined thanks to the belief I'd in their promise that they would have one copy ordered for me the next week and that I didn't have to worry then. Again, I was unlucky as that was sold out, when I hit Blossoms after a couple of weeks and I cursed Blossoms for not keeping their word. The lesson learned was:
When you want to read something desperately and have time, and if you're convinced that you can't get that either at relatively lesser price or at least, in your city, don't prevent yourself from buying an old copy, after all, the content is what one should care about and not the looks and you mayn't have time to read that when you'll get a new edition!!!
Luck in my favor this time. The idea of inquiring other shops in the city struck me (Although against the opinion of Blossoms' guy) and finally, I ended up buying the latest edition of the book at Higgins and Bothams few days back!
This book is a mighty thick one. About 800 pages. I've started reading the book and I was pretty much impressed with the Preface of the book. It's all about "I", the Self, so writes the author. In his attempt to explain his central theme, he takes the aid of beautiful concepts , primarily, from the world of mathematics, music and art. He writes, "It is in the inevitable self-mirroring that arises, however impartial and imperfect it may be, that the strange loops of consciousness start to swirl." This sentence emphasizes the fact that contradiction, and self-examination, self-assessment induce you into strange loops and there are strong chances of your becoming conscious of your deeds and of your starting to think about pros and cons of your very actions. It's all about reflections and learning from mistakes...
On random scanning and reading of the pages, I find that book is full of puzzles and that the book distinguishes beautiful aspects of meaning and self-reference and their linkage to completeness of this world. Oh, yeah, lot of computer science, art, pictures, AI, neural science stuff, maths, philosophy, chess, cognition, recursion, logic, reasoning etc. You name any aspect of life and you'll have it there! It's quite impossible to derive the single point of focus in the book. It's all of them and lot more than that.
I've been dwelling on the concepts demonstrated in this book these days and it's no surprise that I'm discovering lots and lots of strange patterns in spectrum of my life and in the spectra of the lives of people around me, people in my universe!
I've just finished few pages. In the meantime, I couldn't help but post some extraordinary art work of M C Escher, from this book.
(Below) Mosaic II (lithograph, 1957) & Waterfall (lithograph, 1961) respectively...
Until next time,
Sanjeev In a Strange Loop.
