Love of Knowledge

Love of Knowledge is a very interesting piece of experimental literature. Not all the experiments succeed (the short poems and drawings are definitely a product of the time and are for now at least retro-cool), but all are useful to the reader. Every gesture Tarthang Tulku makes in this book accumulates and contributes to a particular effect: Reading this is not unlike tracing the threads in several antique quilts of different design at once, and one of those quilts is sewn together from the reader's response to the text, the other "quilts". Done reading and trying the mind-experiments Tarthang Tulku offers you? The signs, smells, sounds, and other sensory experiences arise, too, in the same pattern the book pointed out to you. This is doubly uncanny because in the world "nothing has changed, it's still the same." Love of Knowledge doesn't introduce the reader to a virtual reality, but a new take on the same ol' tune. Michel Foucault argues in The Order of Things that our understanding of the world is not what we assume it to be, and that our normal, comfortable, hypothetically sane conventional truths are not self-evident, not the only or best way to approach the Thing-as-such, or anything at all. Tarthang Tulku lets you experience that insight for yourself in Love of Knowledge. Aesthetically, Love of Knowledge is my favorite of the Time, Space, Knowledge books (but the others are also really, really good).