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It was also around this time that I had a transition in thinking. I associate it with my years of morning hangout at a coffee house at the bottom the hill on Mission Street. I read Shogun where I found the history fascinating. But the writing style was so atrocious that I never finished it. I had tried to read Tolstoy a number of times, but could not get passed all the unfamiliar Russian character names, that are thrown at one in the first chapters. Shogun inspired me to try again to read War and Peace, an historical novel and masterpiece of great literature. This time I was successful and I found that as one becomes familiar with the recurring characters, most other character names are transitory. But what I realized with the reading of War and Peace, and following with Anna Karenina, was that the way he described the human character was just the same as today. I could go down to city hall and see those same characters meerschaum pipes and all. I realized that human nature probably wasn't progressive. I had heard a line on the radio when I was a teenager. It was that the Greeks had divided something or other into Conservative and Progressive. It stuck and I always remembered it. I began to think of the world in terms of Progressive and Conservative which evolved into a theory over time.
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