I don’t know if I’m going to be able to keep up intellectually with this book, but I just love the ideas and hope that I can come to understand it:
Whirly Art became a (very) idiosyncratic language, with its own eshetic and traditions. However, traditions are made to be broken, and as soon as I spotted a tradition, I began experimenting around, violating it in various ways to see how I might move beyond my current state–how I might "jump out of the system". (p. xix)
This is in the Notes on the Cover by Douglas Hofstadter. It is a brief explanation of his development of and obsession with a design he started playing with as a kid and kept working and exploring for years, all based on the alphabet symbols of various languages.
And as he tells us, he brings in mathematics and seeks a unifying theme to life that can be found in language as well as music and science.
This is going to be good. Tough, but good.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology