It could be argued that I have either been reading far too many deep books recently, or I need to get out more.

It started two weeks ago while wandering past a wonderful little bookshop nearby. In a quiet sidestreet in the east end of London a few minutes walk from here is a bookshop, the like of which has become far from common in recent years.

The man behind the counter is there in all weathers, at all times of day. When I walk past in the early morning he has his newspaper propped on the counter with the radio reporting from the BBC, and in the late evening he often stands on the stoop of his doorway, watching the world go by.

The shop is warm, friendly, and is full of treasures in the form of books that chain stores do not carry. The kind of books I like. The current publishers “best sellers” are relegated to a couple of shelves and a coffee table as you walk in - beyond there shelves cover every surface, stacked neatly with art, sociology, poetry, science, psychology, history, biography, the classics, and more.

A spiral staircase leads downwards to an “adult” section - the only one I have ever seen in a book shop. I have never been down there - I am too scared. I imagine there will be photography, art, erotic fiction. I am guessing though.

I digress.

While nosing around the bookshop a couple of weeks ago I happened upon a series of books by noteworthy philosophers being sold at a discount. I picked up “Thus Spake Zarathustra” by Friedrich Nietzsche - a treatise on philosophy and morality made accessible through the dramatisation of it’s subjects though a sage-like character called Zarathustra.

While travelling home that night I started reading, and found myself completely and utterly engrossed. Having never read a book about philosophy before, I suddenly found a branch of academia that spoke in the same language that my mind seems to work - full of questions about the world, the nature of people, and of course our place in the middle of the maelstrom.

I read a little more about Nietzsche, and discovered that his writings on “Man as Superman” were taken up by the Nazi party in the 1930s and distorted horrifically to suit their own twisted purposes. At first I was horrified - horrified that I had been fascinated by a text was used to validate the attempted development of the Arian race. Then of course I realised that the practice of raping such literature has been prevalent throughout history.

And so, my course of discovery continues. Today I wandered past and before I knew it I was stood in front of a shelf with famous names once again - Goeth, Freud, Jung. In order to ease my path towards such weighty tomes, I picked up a tour-guide of sorts. A tour of the thinkers - who they were, where and when they lived - what they wrote about.

Wish me luck on my journey of discovery - of who we think we are, why we think we are here, and how we think we work.

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Tags: Philosophy, Nietzsche, Thinking, Books