This is really an amazing opportunity that you created for us all to reminisce and think about the books that changed our lives. I would not be able to choose only one book, I must name at least 2 books, even though I know that you asked for only one!

The first book that I must name that had a tremendous influence on my life was the first time I read Albert Camus’ The Outsider/Stranger. It is strange how some books can change the course of your life. I remember the day the lecturer mentioned the books of Camus in Art studies. Thinking about it now seems like a movie, I could not wait to get to the library that was just outside of the classroom, across the “Rooiplein” (it has some connections to the red square…), but I digress. I took out a series of books by Camus, The Myth of Sysiphus, The Plague, and then obviously The Outsider/Stranger. But I also took out the book Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre. In that month, I drenched myself in existential literature, experiencing a side of literature that I never knew existed. At that stage, my reading was for leisure, consisting mostly of Stephen King books. Within a single half-hour lecture, the course of my life was changed.

I read Camus’ The Outsider/Stranger three or four times over the course of ten years. Each time I gained something new from it, each time changing my perspective on life. Someone once said that you cannot read the same book twice, nor can you step in the same river twice. This is so true as every time you read a book, or experience something in your life, it changes your perspective, even if only by a little. When you go back to the same book, you bring something different to it, but you also expect to gain something different in return. Different elements will become important, different things will pop out this time around.

Camus’ The Outsider/Stranger also rings true for the second book that changed my life in a radical way, the work of the ancient Pyrrhonian sceptic, Sextus Empiricus. He wrote the Pyrrhonian Outlines, a handbook of sorts detailing the various tenets and “tools” of the Pyrrhonists. For them, and what changed my life, our very disposition in life should be one of always seeking, always looking, never holding opinions in such a rigid way as to never change them. Going even further, we should “return” to everyday life without holding extra beliefs about everyday life. Their example is that if I expect (believe) honey to be sweet, and it is not, I would be feeling disappointed or mad. But if I did not have that extra layer of belief, I would not be left disappointed, life would just be, and I would experience life as it is given to me. This profound disposition, or way of life, changed everything I do in life.

I read the Pyrrhonian Outlines in my first year doing my master’s thesis, four years after I read Camus’ The Outsider/Stranger. I re-read Camus’ work, with the Pyrrhonian lifestyle in mind, and I could see so many similarities. I always wonder what books famous writers read. I wonder if Camus read anything of Pyrrho, or Michel de Montaigne who wrote a very famous essay on Pyrrhonism.

What is strange to me is the happenstance nature of being exposed to these books. I sat in on a lecture where the titles of these books were mentioned. When I did my master’s thesis, I perchance saw a few books on Pyrrhonism at the library. If I had not seen that shelve, I would not have been exposed to Pyrrhonism.

All of this led to me doing my PhD now. Even though I am not doing it on either of these two books, without them I would not have done my PhD. Neither would I be the philosopher/thinker/author I am now. Nor would I be leading my life in the way I am doing it now.

To end off, here is a quote from The Outsider/Stranger:

And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.

Thank you so much for giving us this opportunity to think about the books that shaped our lives! I might take up the challenge and write a longer piece too!