When I first encountered this book, I was working as an outside hand at a small town hardware store trying to save up enough money at $5.85 / hour to afford to move to go to college. It cost me $10 in gas every day just to get to work, and I am deathly allergic to almost every outside plant in Oklahoma, so it was a miserable few months. At lunch time I would go to the local library because it had air conditioning, and I happened to check out this book. For the next 8 weeks, reading this book on breaks was the taste of escape into the life of the mind.