I. Глава 1. Роза Мира и её ближайшие задачи
On the one hand, most people, especially youth, really do need shorter summaries, paraphrasing, simple explanations. They need to be encouraged to summarize what they read, not depend on savants to fetch everything for them. Also, it should be pressed on readers that a book worth reading is never finished with. It's also important to highlight a book's uniqueness, what makes it stand out from anti-dictatorship works (i.e. George Orwell's personal criticisms for Stalin)?
Here's an interesting anecdote from Andrei Gromyko:
On the one hand, it's true that it's somewhat redundant to merely restate his words, although it's often necessary to reformulate some of what he wrote and improving on his terminology.
But why do what somebody else is already doing? For every new idea one receives, they should add another. And if they can't, then reinforce Andreev's thoughts with those of others, which is what I've been doing. A lone voice in the wilderness goes unheard. But Andreev was not a lone voice, there were many distinguished people who thought like him, I believe we should draw attention to them too, after filtering through their works: Viktor Schauberger, Jacque Fresco, Tom Brown, Jr., Dag Hammarskjold, Simone Weil, Philippe Nizier, Pavel Florensky, Nikolai Fyodorov, etc.
I believe what we should first do is develop methods to train their faculty of concentration.
The average person is cursed with short attention spans/boredom, preferring to chase after amusements/thrills/distractions than committing to a task. People's attention has been totally devastated by modern skim reading habits, social media, smartphones, etc. We absorb more information than we can handle.
https://digmedia.lucdh.nl/2021/12/21/the-reason-why-my-attention-span-became-shorter-than-a-duck/
Some seem to think that political and economic factors are decisive for everything, and only these are worth giving all their attention to. Actually, decisive factor is the personality of the statesman, friendships/enmity between two statesmen, and the ideas which influenced them.
People are too distracted by what's going on in their lives and the world around them. By age 30-35, they stabilize their lives, but then they don't know where to turn to, they turn agnostic. I have the impression that most people stop learning after graduating, giving up development by age 40, consigned to mediocrity. Having survived the ordeal of soul-crushing exams, they are made to believe they are ready for life, and resign themselves to the belief that society cannot be changed. Then they force their values on children, they bring up children in this manner:
«Oh, I got through it, my child's no different from me, they will get used to it.» (although I haven't actually heard this being spoken)
Exams do not show that a person is fit for life's trials, it only proves they had good memory, those who excel will be merely useful to society as civil servants or professors.
A Russian futurist I met, while reading up on Jacque Fresco, shared an article with me: https://darkpaster.github.io/topics/en/cognition/solving-personal-problems
It clarifies that most people need something to aspire for, it's not a lack of motivation they suffer from; and that developing their attention's more important than thinking about how to spend their spare time:
It's compatible with what Andreev wrote about learning to sift out the primary from the secondary.
But how can we make Daniil Andreev more relateable to people? They will express pity for him, but they wouldn't know what it was like to go through that ordeal, because they're uninformed about the social conditions of his time period. It was not by learning more about his life that I sympathized with his ideals. For me, he helped fill a missing need, and he gave me a worthy cause to champion and spread.
«The poet has incorporated his whole individuality in these writings, and there, if we can read aright, we shall find him.» Georg Brandes had this to say about Shakespeare, while criticizing scholars, who were saying they knew nothing about him, but overdid it by saying nobody can ever come to know anything about him.
I learned more about the conditions in Soviet Russia while reading Master and Margarita and watching Boy's Word, having taken up suggestions from a literay Russian historian friend. He told me how his teachers after ww2 instructed students to never let bread go to waste, to give it to dogs or pigeons, but never throw it away:
«For example, in my childhood, in the Soviet Union, we were taught at school and in the family that it is not good to throw leftovers from the table into the trash. Teachers told us that in besieged Leningrad, people would be happy to get at least some of these crumbs, which modern people simply sweep into the trash.»
Редактирование:
Когда его читал первый раз, то было ощущение, что продираюсь через густой лес, джунгли новых терминов и аккордов разнообразных тем, одновременно что-то улавливая из смыслов. И по прошествии времени, до сих пор возникают вопросы к тому, что там написано...
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