LEADERSHIP, PART TWO
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AUTHORS
READING STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
by Robert Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land, 1961
In 1962, Stranger in a Strange Land won the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Novel–and became the first science fiction novel to enter The New York Times Book Review ’s best-seller list.
In 2012, it was included in a Library of Congress exhibition of “Books That Shaped America.”
“I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers … It is an invitation to think – not to believe.”
“In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.”– —Robert Heinlein
SOME CLARIFYING DEFINITIONS FOR UNDERSTANDING
“BEAUTY IS ONLY SKIN . . . .”
From Sexual Expression: A Manual for Trainers, 1981.
SEXUALITY: feelings of warmth, closeness, comfort, touching, security, support, love, affection, mutuality.
SEX: pertaining to genital behavior and reproduction, which may/may not include feelings of sexuality
EROTICA: about sexuality, including love, sensuality, touching, warmth, acceptance AND IS CONSENTING/CONSENSUAL; can be passionate, a yearning for a particular person and closeness. It is a POSITIVE CHOICE and FREE WILL.
Photographs, paintings, sculpture, films, literature, music, food, dance, drawings, or any other art forms that stimulate sexually or that one finds pleasurable for erotic feelings are considered erotica.
PORNOGRAPHY: about POWER, including force, coercion, torture, bondage, wounding, hurting, bruising, or humiliation. Such material shows pain equals pleasure, that we are conqueror or victim, that pleasurable sex is only obtained through some degree of sadism or masochism. Such materials place people in a position of feeling diminished and enraged, usually materials of vulnerability and dominance and LOVE IS NOT PORTRAYED, but rather violence against women, children, and people who are defense less or different.
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SEX = lust, libido (a need)
EROS = the drive of love to procreate or create; the urge towards higher forms or being and relationship (a desire)
PHILIA = friendship, brotherly love
AGAPE/CARITAS = love devoted to the welfare of the other, benevolence [Rollo May, Love and Will, 1969]
“May perceived the sexual mores of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as commercialization of sex and pornography, as having influenced society such that people believed that love and sex are no longer associated directly. According to May, emotion has become separated from reason, making it acceptable socially to seek sexual relationships and avoid the natural drive to relate to another person and create new life. May believed that sexual freedom can cause modern society to neglect more important psychological developments. May suggests that the only way to remedy the cynical ideas that characterize our times is to rediscover the importance of caring for another, which May describes as the opposite of apathy.
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Eros is the child of Ares and Aphrodite [Mars and Venus]
Eros is in conflict with Thanatos (death instinct).
The moment of greatest significance in LOVEMAKING is not the orgasm but rather the moment of UNION, the realization of transcendence of the self, the loss of self with another.
“WHAT GREAT BOOKS?”
“The great books are those that tradition, and various institutions and authorities, have regarded as constituting or best expressing the foundations of Western culture…derivatively the term also refers to a curriculum or method of education based around a list of such books.
Mortimer Adler lists three criteria for including a book on the list:
the book has contemporary significance; that is, it has relevance to the problems and issues of our times;
the book is inexhaustible; it can be read again and again with benefit;
the book is relevant to a large number of the great ideas and great issues that have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last 25 centuries.” [Wikipedia]
TODAY: In Defense of a Liberal Education (2015) by Fareed Zakaria is a “great book.”
YESTERDAY: The Idea of A University (1854) by John Henry Newman is a “great book.”
Here are some other “Great Books”:
Classical/Old Fashioned, but not-outdated sources for reading/reading skills:
Art and Reality— Joyce Cary (1957)
The Dynamics of Literary Response--Norman N. Holland (1968)
Great Books–David Denby (1996)
How to Read a Book–Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren (1940; 1972)
Literature as Exploration–Louise M. Rosenblatt (1937; 1968)
On Moral Fiction–John Gardner (1978)
Perspectives in Contemporary Criticism–Sheldon Norman Grebstein (1968)
Principles of Literary Criticism–Lacelles Abercrombie (1932; 1960)
Understanding Fiction–Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren (1943; 1959)
Memories of a Time 