Ishmael

i have just finished reading the first chapter of a new book and i have the sense that this book is going to have a profound impact upon me. the book is called Ishmael. It is a narrative written by daniel quinn. it seems to be about the dialogue between a man and a gorilla. (sounds a bit wacko i know, but by the end of the first chapter i am lost in the book and accepting it's realities.)

the thought in this quote plays in my mind...

"Once when i was in college...i wrote a paper for a philosophy class. i don't remember exactly what the assignment was-something to do with epistemology. here's what it said in the paper, roughly: Guess what? The Nazis didn't lose the war after all. They won it and flourished. They took over the world and wiped out every last Jew, every last Gypsy, black, East Indian, and American Indian. Then when they were finished with that, they wiped out the Russians and the Poles and the Bohemians... This took a long, long time and when it was over, everyone in the world was one hundred percent Aryan, and they were all very, very happy.

Naturally the textbooks used in the school no longer mentioned any race but the Aryan or any language but German or any religion but Hitlerism or any political system but National Socialism. There would have been no point. After a few generations of that, no one could have put anything different into the textbooks even if they'd wanted to, because they didn't know any different.

But one day two young students were conversing at the University of New Heidelberg in Tokyo. Both were handsome in the usual Aryan way, but one of them looked vaguely worried and unhappy. That was Kurt. His friend said, 'What's wrong Kurt? Why are you always moping around like this?' Kurt said, 'I'll tell you, Hans. There is something that's troubling me-and troubling me deeply.' his friend asked what it was. 'it is this,' Kurt said. " i can't shake the crazy feeling that there is some small thing that we're being lied to about.'

And that is how the paper ended."