| json_metadata | "{"app":"musing/1.1","appTags":["life","book"],"appCategory":"life","appTitle":"Which book do you think has biggest impact on your life?","appBody":"<p>There have been many books that have had a great influence in me and my desire to pursue academic, profesional, personal, family, and spiritual enlightenment. If I had to mention one single book, the one that started it all, it would be Argentinian writer, <strong>José Ingenieros</strong>'s <em><strong>El Hombre Mediocre</strong></em><strong> </strong>(1913). The mediocre man is a book I ran into when I was a teenager. <strong>I was probably 13 or 14</strong>, no idea how that tiny book made it into our small library (that was basically one bookcase). It was the first book that challenged my intelligence and I promised myself I would get to understand it.</p>\n<p>T<strong>he first time I tried to read this book I could not pass page 3</strong>. I had highlighted so many unknown words in every page that I got very frustrated at my inability to get the full literal meaning, let alone other meanings implied. We did not have a good dictionary and personal computers and the internet were far from being a reality.</p>\n<p><strong>The book stuck in my mind</strong>, its premise, its title. I felt it was important and<strong> I decided that I would revisit it some time late</strong>r. That time came when I was about to finish High School. We had read some venezuelan novels by Romulo Gallegos and Arturo Uslar Pietri (the language was very accessible), but we had also read fragments of some classics such as the Illiad. <strong>I knew there were other kids my age (16, 17) in other parts of the world reading more than we were. I knew we could do better and I felt mediocr</strong>e.</p>\n<p><strong>I got a good dictionary from the public library and went back to that tiny book and read it twice in a cuple of month</strong>. It was illuminating. I felt my brain was about to explode. Some of my friends wanted to unfriend me because I did not want to go out todo what they were doing and was talking all the time about a new word or concept I had learned from the book.</p>\n<p>I had officially become a nerd and I was about to lose my friends. I did not care that much. The book was compelling enough. It was a revelation to see how Ingenieros divided men in roughly <strong>3 groups</strong>: in<strong>ferior, mediocre and idealis</strong>t. Most of us were mediocre, imitators, \"shodows projected by society\", some were inferior, so inept that they were uncable of even mimicking and were utterly unadapted to society's basic rules.</p>\n<p><strong>The ideal man was the idealist, who could be able to understand the infinite possibilities of his imagination and intellect and to question anything that forced him to conform, to accomodate, to accept blindly and to follow</strong>. At age 17 such notions were very radical and I experienced a dramatic change in terms of how I conceived my culture, the world and my place in it. I was already a book lover, but I understood then that reading alone was not going to be enough and that reading just about anything, especially what most people read was even more dangerous.</p>\n<p> </p>","appDepth":2,"appParentPermlink":"pkpjd5paw","appParentAuthor":"inuke","musingAppId":"aU2p3C3a8N","musingAppVersion":"1.1","musingPostType":"answer"}" |
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