Health Homework (3.1) FEED yourself some BRAIN CANDY [books, audiobooks]
Brain candy is the only type of candy that is actually good for you, making you stronger and healthier, but without the empty calories of sweets and pastries.
Bonus: This article includes 2 complete PDF books
Intellectual growth: If you want to be smart(er), then you have to exercise your mind by exposing yourself to new ideas, new words, new concepts.
For a tree to become tall and great, it must twine hard roots around hard rocks.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra [free PDF book included below] — I have included one of the complete versions published by Cambridge University as a PDF document below; many of the academic translations of Nietzsche’s work lack any style or fluidity and obviously weren’t written by anyone who’s ever danced salsa.
If you want to have a sharp mind and useful insight at the moment of need, then you must train your brain ahead of time. Here, I’ll share with you a few of my favorite resources and also several videos that I have watched or re-watched within the past 48 hours.
I’ll briefly mention 3 works that I hold in high esteem in this regard:
Stumbling on Happiness [audio] by Daniel Gilbert: If you want to bathe your brain in the English language then I have to recommend the audio version of this book.1 I’m not recommending the material of the book, but rather the style of the book; his use of language is superlative (as I recall from 2006, when it impressed me). If you listen to the audiobook, your brain is going to be activated simply by the fluidity of the syntax. If you want actual content, then you’ll probably have to look elsewhere.
Fountainhead [audio preferred] by Ayn Rand: This is this one of the grandest literature works produced in the United States; for decades, it was considered second only to the Christian Bible in its popularity among Americans. Reading the actual book when I was 17 years old didn’t provide me much, and the shortcoming was on my part because I didn’t know how to understand literature with any depth. Later, I listened to two different versions in audiobook format, one is complete (32hours) and the other is abbreviated (8hours). Both of these are fantastic productions and also provided insight to her sarcasm which probably gets lost in printed format. I can reasonably guess that I have listened to various versions of this book several hundred times; for me, it has provided important insight into human dynamics and power struggles. My appreciation of her Fountainhead as an important anchor in the American literary canon2 does not imply that I agree with Ayn Rand on other issues (eg, her deification of cannibalistic capitalism) because although she was obviously a prolific writer and very intelligent, she was also socially myopic, emotionally wounded and famously arrogant in important ways that injured her thinking-writing, as I’ve briefly mentioned elsewhere regarding her very revealing attack on Nietzsche [Writing Tips for Doctors, Nov 2021] and also as detailed by her former lover and colleague Dr Nathaniel Brandon in Six-Pillars of Self-Esteem. Rand’s Fountainhead is essentially a modern rewriting of N’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra; she probably knew this and for this reason attacked N to try to create some difference and distance — the problem is that she did this in a way that revealed both her internal conflict and her social ineptness.
Thus spoke Zarathustra [audio preferred] by Friedrich Nietzsche: Anybody who knows me, has read my books, or has seen my portrait tattoo knows that I will forever be a great fan of Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings. Most of his works are brilliant and very empowering, and this is exactly why they are censored from public view and not significantly included in formal education either in Europe or the United States. The brilliant production by Naxos audiobooks of his famous Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a feast of mental imagery, but not necessarily a shower of words as is the aforementioned work by Gilbert; very similar to Rand’s Fountainhead, N’s historical rewriting of religious foundations is rich with sarcasm and nuance, which is why I’ve listened to it probably more than a thousand times. I read the paper version translated by Kauffmann when I was 24yo; the great irony of Kauffmann’s scholarship is that he never seems to have understood the totality of the works that he translated. I have included one of the complete versions, published by Cambridge University as a PDF document here; like others in the genre, many of the academic translations of Nietzsche’s work lack any style or fluidity and obviously weren’t written by anyone who’s ever danced salsa. Again, even if it is abridged, the the Naxos production of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is amazing, beautiful, and perhaps flawless.
You have to exercise and train your mind (intellectual health) just as you should be doing with your body (physical health).
Fitness = strength and endurance: If you want to be fit, then you have to exercise, which means moving objects against gravity (resistance training) and/or moving your body against space and time (endurance training).
Agility, coordination: If you want to be skilled and agile, then you must practice movement, such as dance, skill sports (eg, archery, marksmanship) martial arts.
Intellectual growth: If you want to be smart(er), then you have to exercise your mind by exposing yourself to new ideas, new words, new concepts.
A few words of caution regarding eloquent temptations and “seduction by grammatical construction”
"We love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire." — Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
“…seduction by grammatical construction…”
Nietzsche’s preface to Beyond Good and Evil
Remember that simply because something is eloquent and sounds great and pulls on our heartstrings and reinforces our biases, this does not mean that it’s accurate or that we should follow its suggestion.
When we are reading something eloquent and seductive, we have to be on our guard for errors that might slip past us even as we dine on the sweetness of language and ideas.
https://www.academia.edu/35150248/Stumbling_on_Happiness
The term "literary canon" refers to a classification of literature. It is a term used widely to refer to a group of literary works that are considered the most important of a particular time period or place. https://www.languagehumanities.org/what-is-a-literary-canon.htm