Dear Bloggers, I have to which I have no answer. As rather well cultured westerners with pretty decent ideas of the world outside of the U.S. is this book important? Have we really learned all that much, or have we just read digested and stored in the depths of our memory ignoring it for analytical purposes. Are books important? Novels, do they really even teach us all that much? Is it important, or is it all just part of a silly neverending search for material knowledge? Is this kind of material knowledge that is important? And maybe a smaller question than that, for the sake of the small things, are they important. The small things, the things that will undoubtably dissapear in time in life or in death? and is this book helpful at all? Do we feel smarter or more enlightened?