To be completely honest, the concept of becoming friends with an old book still escapes me a little. Especially at the beginning of the exercise, but even up until the last task I have found myself questioning the purpose of this entire Project. But I guess this is also kind of the lesson this task is meant to teach us; to question things and to reflect on them. Just by interacting with a book, and especially in the last task where these books together start to form a universe, we may not learn exactly the meaning of each book, but we start to understand the interconnectivity of things and how they relate to each other. The way I see it, we are meant to develop some kind of literacy in architectural thought patterns which persist throughout history, by simply being exposed to them. This is also why it makes sense that there was no need for us to understand the language of our book. This is actually a concept that I am starting to see at least in some way, shape or form, in many other courses. It is important to expose oneself and try to reflect, question, relate and comprehend things, and then to kind of develop a personal opinion or interpretation based on this involvement and exposure. I guess this development of some kind of literacy in thought patterns and ways of thinking and seeing the world is an important base on which we can then build and start to actually dive into the meanings behind books and authors. Only this way is it possible to then fully interpret and understand what is being said.
So in many ways I have struggled with this task because many of the exercises are needlessly time consuming and often kind of dull, but the lesson here is not to be found in the content of each individual book but in how these books connect and what they represent.