Ask HN: Which book/essay changed your life?

I'm a jazz musician & artist who also studied philosophy a lot for a long time. Aged about 30 I was reading a lot of philosophy books about art, and about philosophy of music, both the classics and the latest books. Trying to understand how on earth Rachmaninov's 2nd Symphony could have the effect on me that it did. But it seemed each new book just split the subject into finer pieces, about which they knew less and less. Plus a lot of recent philosophy of music books seemed...stupid, blind, written by people unqualified to write them. Anyway, Lakoff & Johnson in Philosophy in the Flesh mention John Dewey as someone who never fell victim to the Subjectivist/Objectivist split.. So I picked up Art as Experience where it had been on my shelf for years, unappreciated. And..instantly all my problems with understanding music were solved. He talks a lot about things in everyday life—someone poking a fire, or (my favourite) a job interview!—showing how the energies, tensions, patterns are the same as those in art. Maybe sounds obvious, but the philosophy books I'd been reading got further and further from life. So, I stopped reading about philosophy of art. I'm not saying I suddenly understood everything about how art does what it does, but it was no longer a confusing, troubling problem. It just seemed natural. (Dewey doesn't have the most exciting prose style, but what he says more than compensates for that.)

Emerson - Essays

(My first book had Essays, first and second series, Representative Men, and some other stuff) It was hugely inspiring every day for many years, from when I was about 20. He writes precisely to be inspiring. He teaches you to be yourself. But also at first it was as though he'd had written about 10,000 things I'd experienced but thought were impossible to describe. If I don't read him so often now, his themes are part of me; usually it's to look up some lines I partly remember. I've probably spent more time with him than anyone.

Vonnegut - Sirens of Titan

I discovered it aged about 15. The first novel I really loved, that somehow spoke to me, that I could totally relate to. Very funny too. I read it over and over again on the school bus, a 40 minute trip, for 6 months or so. Some years I later enjoyed his Breakfast of Champions a lot too, but nothing was like Sirens. At 15 I had a telescope, was into Carl Sagan, wanted to be an astronomer, so I guess the space aspect appealed. p.s. I was later in a free jazz/rock band called The Ghosts of Saturn. Coincidentally, my brother was once in a rock band called CSI (Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum!)

I didn't love it. But that probably says more about my taste in films than it does about the film itself...