It is oftimes lamented that there is a hyper-abundance of pressing concerns and tasks to undertake which happily occurs concurrently with the severest scarcity of time.
And I have just joined the ranks of the millions and billions of poor souls who can testify first-hand to the truth of that statement.
Forms, medicals, clothing, allowance, bank accounts, insurance, flight details, more forms, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. It makes one sick just to think through the whole grand old joyful rigmarole of administratum and felicitous fusillade of details.
And then there's the reading programme which I hoped would form the backbone of my foundational reading for the upcoming term.
10 months of mental stagnation following the 2 years of mental degeneration (read: NS) have sure done wonders for my cognitive processes, and when you combine that with the sheer abstractness of writers such as Giovanni Sartori and Ronald Chilcote and Robert Keohane, the resultant feeling is disturbingly similar to the proverbial bashing of one's head against a brick wall.
Take Giovanni Sartori and his Democratic Theory for instance. He's not the worst among the three, and he does have long tracts of sublime lucidity that somehow manage to catalyse my comprehension of the most abstract concepts and theoretic formulations, but for the most part he simply goes off into a multi-dimensional line of argument which I have absolutely no hope of following.
He seems at times to be more concerned with word defintions than concept definitions, and though he claims the reverse, it doesn't help that the nature of some concepts is to be virtually the same entity as the word-label that they bear, and this thus leads to total confusion when he tries to define a concept and ends up defining the word. And of course, his lack of real-life, concrete examples (except for his notable chapter on Athenian democracy), despite his claim of taking the historical-empirical approach of analysis, only adds to the difficulty of understanding him and what he is arguing about in relation to the practical issues of today's political world.
Enough. Back to the mental meat grinder. There's still Rousseau's Contrat Sociale to be read.
