Where do I start?

Even if one is not an actual immigrant or expatriate, it is still possible to think as one, to imagine and investigate in spite of barriers, and always to move away from the centralising authorities towards the margins, where you see things that are usually lost on minds that have never travelled beyond the conventional and the comfortable.

- Edward Said, in the third Reith Lecture in the 'Representations of the Intellectual' series

In my moments of clarity, I lament that I haven't been able to respond to the heeding of my tutors (as I will now call anyone who has taught me something, because teacher is reserved for the ones who have earned a living from being in the same classroom with me) to take leave of my comfort zone.

I started reading to have everyone leave me alone. Now that I have succeeded, and constantly bask in my isolation, what do I read for? 

There are (to me) new forms of literature that are intimidating, because of the nuances in thought they present I haven't been able to detect on my own, and also that require nothing less than total concentration on my part and at the same time revealing, because they allow me to reflect on my and (what I perceive to be) the writer's own patterns of thinking and doing. When I succeed in immersing myself in the texts, I am delighted to find another world, one which I never noticed, and the wonder I feel is usually sufficient impetus to read on. The questions of why couldn't you do this too? will surface, more often than not. <- is this the mark of the ignoramus? the lack of appreciation for the context that propelled these works, and, too, the lack of awareness of limits to one's abilities? For the works of giants, with their elegant prose that frame their ideas so well, that they produced in their youth, I am unable to read without guilt. I am also unable to read them when I cannot focus. 

It is said that the Great look at the people better than themselves and ask how they may close the gap while the Destructive magnify the differences and despair that they should ever reach the same heights, then wallow in self-pity.