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I remember watching my friend go down a slide at a swimming pool. She was facing my direction and I was facing her direction. It occurred to me that her visual point of view was opposite of mine, that she was seeing me and the house whilst I was seeing her and the slide, and realising she had an entirely separate reality from mine. I was about six as well. It bothered me and I was very confused about identity and point of view.

I haven't read Skinner's works. Sorry.

blooie, I agree about children. I don't think any of us are truly solipsistic, especially parents.

Yes, I've definitely experienced that temperature.

Did you ever read Lisa, Bright and Dark?

LOL....I really didn't care about the other kids' visual viewpoint. I just didn't have it in me.

There was probably some genius in Isabella as a child.


Do you feel you had some sort of "uniqueness" when you were a kid?

My only uniqueness that I know of is that I was married to Elton John and lived in a play fort for eight years.

lol but true. I was a space cadet.

same q

I'm sure that you've both read Thoreau though, right?

I never really had the presence of mind, socially, to consider whether I was different from them or not in that sense. To outward appearances, I was actually quite a normal child; I liked football, I played games, I did pretty well in my classes. Most of my weirdness was put down to simple shyness. It was in secondary school that I, and everyone else, realised there was something fundamentally different, in the social sense, about me. I never had any friends in primary school, but nobody realised because I either locked myself up in the toilets or in the computer room during break times and a seating plan was in place during lessons.

What's the oldest book you own?

I've read Thoreau. I'm not too happy that he wasn't more of a friendly person.

He had what he wanted in Walden Pond (except, perhaps, for material things).

I own my mother's Nobel Prize collection. Excerpts of the Nobel Prize winners from 1901 to sometime in the 1970s.


Do you own a blanket or something that's more than 40 years old? And that you still actually use?

I still use my stimmy from when I was a baby. It's the satin from my brother's baby blanket. I have the whole blanket but I just use the satin that I cut off of it. I also have a few keepsakes from childhood including my spoon collection. I have an owl planter (plant-holder) that I got from a random classmate when I turned 7.

prometheus, I used to hide like that too. I was obsessed with hiding in library carols. I never ate in my school cafeterias once in my life. I hid in the carols with my lunch or on my breaks.

I was 'different' my whole life but my mother was too busy cleaning to notice or seek help. She was pleased I was 'out of sight, out of mind' because she could ignore me in good conscience.

My oldest book is a 1900 edition of Villette.

same q about old objects.

The life he lived in Walden Pond is almost exactly my conception of the "good life". Perfect solitude, perfect simplicity, perfect safety from the hustle and bustle of modernity, perfect tranquility and unlimited time to study.

A genius must be forgiven if he finds the rabble to be offensive; it's almost true by definition that he must do.

I'm not sure I use anything, with any degree of frequency, as old as you describe.

My oldest book is either a first edition of Tennyson's Idylls of the King or a copy, from around the same time, of the New Testament in Greek. I remember Jimmy M mentioning, a short while ago, that he owned some book from the seventeenth century - incredible.

What's your favourite kind of chocolate?

Chocolate? Anything high quality with a very high cacao content. 86%-100% cacao.

Same q

I'm not a fan of chocolate, but I like milk chocolate rather than dark chocolate if I have to choose.
White chocolate is too sweet.

same q

Either milk or white chocolate. I can't stand dark chocolate. This is one area where I'm completely without good taste. I'm eating a bar of Lindt milk chocolate at the moment.

Who's your favourite philosopher?

idk I'm not much into philosophy

Same question.

John Rawls, JS Mill, Plato and Aristotle.

I didn't like the German philosophers.

same q

The main reason I hid was to avoid people realising I had no friends and being bullied as a result. After a serious bullying problem at my first primary school, I was determined to prevent it from happening again, and mostly was successful.

I tended to avoid hiding in libraries because being a bibliophile also attracted the attention of the bullies. If, as a male, you enjoyed reading books, you were considered "gay", or a "nerd", or a "teacher's pet" or any number of other such things, all of which I was labelled at some point or another.

Moral philosophy: Mill, the Stoics, the Epicureans and Russell.
Epistemology: Wittgenstein and the British empiricists
Politics: Burke, Mill, Russell and the contemporary English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton.

What's your favourite kind of tree?

I don’t know about philosophy except the books my XH gave me which were from Marcus Aurelius but I don’t agree with much of what he says fr myself (temperament is too different frm his)


Tree - oak tree - it’s so cute and pretty plus libraries often use oak leaves n acorns in their programs n decorations


Same Q

I also liked Rousseau.

My favourite trees are willows, fir and white pine.

Prometheus,
That's sad about reading and the hypermasculine "gay" mentality. That must have been and awful. I don't know what people thought of me. I don't know if they knew I existed to be honest. Several people did tease me as being spaced out or acting drunk during my part time jobs. The drunk was because of my clumsiness or because I would 'fake laugh' etc., just to fit in.

Do you like chewing gum?

The only Rousseau I have ever read was his Confessions, which was the very first book I read in the French language. To be quite honest, I have an issue with French philosophy, particularly political philosophy, for the reason that it tends to view man in the abstract, as a thing to be shaped, for his own good, rather than an individual human being who must realise his own destiny. French liberalism is essentially Platonic in the sense of being top-down and bureaucratic, viewing man, quite erroneously, as being perfectible by means of reason alone, while British liberalism is Aristotelian ("bourgeois" is the inevitable accusation here) in the sense that it sees man in more humane, individual terms - as a creature who, by as it were trial and error must arrive at his own conception of the good. The problem of how men are to become good is recognised by the British liberal tradition, quite rightly, to be intractable and not to admit of a definite answer in terms of pure reason alone. In epistemological terms, the difference between French liberalism and British liberalism is that between rationalism and empiricism respectively. The latter, in politics as well as the natural sciences, has proven more fruitful time and time again. Rationalism, when extended to politics, almost invariably leads to disaster - the Terror, Bolshevism, Fascism, Nazism and Mao's Cultural Revolution were all the logical conclusion of Rousseau and his ideas. A nasty man and a nasty philosophy.

Bullying wasn't too big an issue for me - at least after I reached secondary school - but thanks for your sympathy. Actually, towards the end of secondary school, people began to admire me for my intellectual qualities. The worst thing anybody ever did to me was fill a can of Dr Pepper with spit and offer it to me as a drink. That one hurt, but I got over everything else. I was never "beaten up" or anything like that. For the most part, the extent of my bullying was being teased for being a little odd and shy.

I like chewing gum, but won't buy it anymore for the reason that every brand now contains aspartame.

Do you like horses?