For the past several years, I haven't read much for pleasure and enrichment, although I read lots of technical papers and academic journals. Hardly any literary works stimulate my thinkings and interests after my late-twenties. Allen Ginsberg's poems is the only one I want to note for his ways of expression, but not for its contents. I reread Herman Hesse and Rainer M. Rilke several times as I couldn't find any books which grabbed my interests to finish it. I think it's time for me to write my own stories to get stimulated, rather than getting influenced by other's writings.

During April, I reread on times of and works on French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, and Medieval England; and some original and related writings of Francis Bacon, Jane Austen, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Robert Southey, Charles Lamb, George Byron, Percy B. Shelley, David Hume, Alexander Pope, Hogarth, Voltaire and Jean-Jacque Rousseau. Hew...

It has been a while since I read on which is not directly related to what I'm doing, and was definitely fresh to my mind. At first it was difficult to follow the sentences, against the technical and scientific papers I used to read, but within days I was absorbed in reading books after books spending most of the whole April.

I didn't get a fresh look on the French Revolution, but had a deep understanding of the sociological, cultural, political and scientific impacts of Napoleonic War, which formed the ground for the modern society. It's not because it just happened before the modern society, but because it enabled the sociological reshaping of every part of the newly formed people's roles right after the dethroning of monarchs by the revolution. Everything had to find its own role, which is not just inherited to it, for the better or worse.

Many French mathematicians of the time accompanied Napoleon's campaign to Egypt, whose mathematical theorems I had to work on while I was hard at studying mathematics. That may not be the good reason to respect a person, but I want to give Napoleon a point for his contribution to mathematics by including mathematicians to his campaigns, in addition to linguistics where the retrieval of the Rosetta Stone opened a new era of understanding of human's past civilizations. Those discoveries are not trivial at all in the formation of modern times.

As for the other impact of Napoleonic Wars, it helped me see the missing gaps of the present society and I don't want to state about it as I don't have enough formal terminology to describe it. As long as we take it for granted now, we should not try hard way to understand how our ancestor's view on what we now take for granted.

Medieval English authors could have lived today somewhere in America. Time and geogrphy are distant from now, but in the ways they lived and expressed I found parallels with the contemporary America. Many of their works are regarded not worthy of classics these days, and my understanding is it is because that can be reproduced in these days, not distinct in the past and the present.

Their works tell the society of Medieval England, and when I replace some words existing in present society into the words only existed in those days, it's like a contemporary work. No authors are guillotined today; instead they become a center of debates by the media.

I didn't reread whole of Shakespeare's works, but just several quotations of his works and read a lot on times of and on Shakespeare himself. Understanding the Medieval England was my main concern for the readings including Irish and Scottish literatures.

We live in the world fused with idealogies of Voltaire and Rousseau, and I didn't find anything new about them. It has been over ten years and lots of my experiences in the society since I read them last.

What I relearned is as for what we take for granted, it's difficult to see other ways. I didn't try to be in Middle Ages man's shoes to see things I'm seeing now. Instead I try to figure out how the great minds became great minds of our cultural history. They forsaw the future to come and infused the idealogy into their contemporary society.

We didn't take it just because it was given to us or we were forced to take it, but because it seemed like the way it should be. After a while, we just take it for granted without any doubts.

In this digital age, there's a whole new era of thinkings to come which our ancestors and even ourselves never thought of. Everything is keep changing and I can't ever get a solid understanding of anything; I'll have to keep redefing things I defined before. (May 1, 1998)