Shipwrecked

It's been a couple of days since I've watched The River of Vision - On the Works of Daniel Quinn, Author of Ishmael. It's got me thinking about the effects of reading Ishmael. One thing that I think happened to me after I read Ishmael is that I became one of the shipwrecked. Ortega y Gasset once said:

"The [person] with the clear head is the [person] who frees himself from all fantastic 'ideas' and looks life in the face....Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he looks round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only geniune ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest rhetoric, posturing, farce...."

Come to think of it, right now I would say that I was shipwrecked before I read Ishmael and still am over a decade later. The possibility of the human species going extinct still looms on the horizon.