About
“The great end of all human industry, is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modeled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators. Even the lonely savage, who lies exposed to the inclemency of the elements, and the fury of wild beasts, forgets not, for a moment, this grand object of his being.”
- David Hume
I am the Lonely Savage, a young polymath living in Stockholm, Sweden.
Very early in my life, I developed an odd relationship to knowledge. I would seek it out not for the sake of better understanding a certain topic or for becoming more expert in some field, but for the sake of simply attaining the knowledge itself. I could be watching a documentary and think “Huh; I know absolutely nothing about this topic”, and then go to the library to borrow books on the subject matter. A few years later, of course, I would instead rush to the computer to order a couple of books on the topic in question.
Thanks to this morbid curiosity (and my recently improved economic status which allows me to truly indulge in the buying of books), my personal library has recently passed 700 books, and my reading speed has reached around 800 words per minute. I devour book after book on topics as varied as economy, psychology, linguistics, logic, science, history, politics, philosophy and religion, usually jumping from one topic to the next without any significant pause.
Even though most of the books I indulge myself in are non-fictional books of the type listed above; I have a large respect for authors of fiction. Even though science fiction and fantasy were my favorite diversions in the past (Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert and Raymond E. Feist belong to the favorites), my current passion is crime fiction. It’s sad, I know, but I feel that it allows me to take a break from cramming more and more information into my head and lets me try to second-guess the hero of the story. Sherlock Holmes is the obvious favorite, but as of late I’ve found many others that are quite readable. The character of Aloysius Pendergast created by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, for example, is very interesting - but not as interesting as the fact that the built-in dictionary of my MacBook suggested “Undergarment” or “Kindergarten” as better spellings of his surname.
John William Waterhouse - The Lady of Shallot
I am also very interested in the arts, currently enjoying the music and art of Romanticism. There is something magical about closing one’s eyes and drifting off to, for example, Arthur Rubenstein’s interpretation of Liszt’s etude La Campanella or to be drawn along by Chopin’s Fantasie Impromptu op.66. Similarly, I don’t think anybody will ever paint a more beautiful Arthurian image than John William Waterhouse did when he painted The Lady of Shallot in 1888. (”Waterhouse?”, my MacBook Air asks and suggests “Slaughterhouse”)
My hopes, dreams and aspirations are to some day be able to return to the university without having to amass the enormous student loans that one tends to get otherwise. I hope to be able to sustain myself by writing books and holding lectures. Attaining this state of economic independence has still managed to elude me, but now, for the first time, I see the horizon beginning to brighten and a bright future emerging. More on this later as my plans begin to solidify.
I took the name The Lonely Savage from the writings of David Hume. The phrase quoted above is one which I believe in quite fully; that the greatest goal for people is to maximize their own happiness. For this, nations were born, politics and religion created, families founded. Some aspects of this blog will be the exploration of the pursuit of happiness; the goal above goals.
If you’re in a generous mood, My Amazon Wishlist may offer you some way of expressing that generosity.
