Please read previous post with this in mind:
I would love for any/all to share what those “Limit Texts/Artifacts” are for you?
Please share via comment what encounters or engagements with works of art, science, philosophy, writing, music, and any other cultural artifactual form has altered from then on how you select, evaluate, engage other related artifacts from then on?
Polysemic Stupor 
Although moved by music, I have to say cosmology has affected me the most. Physical presence in and scale of the universe has been the greatest rush.
I didn’t know anything about Shostakovich, but having heard part of his 5th Symphony when I was about 11, I asked for a record for my birthday. Mother gave me Karajon’s recording of the 10th Symphony, which was a tribute of sorts to Stalin’s evil reign after his death. Stalin very nearly had Shostakovich killed after hearing the 4th, but Shostakovich wrote the 5th supposedly for the proletariat and thus saved his own back end. After literally hundreds of listens, probably thousands of listens to the second movement, I decided I was going to be a composer. Subsequently, I failed at music composition.
Likewise, a few years ago, I read DFW’s Infinite Jest, and I decided I wanted to be a writer. I’ve also failed at that, but both of those artists inspired me to live through interesting times in my life, and they somehow taught me the joy of creating art.
In college, reading James Joyce taught me that anything goes in art as long as it is about what it’s like to live.
There are lots of other writers. In fact, if a book is not transformative to me after a few pages, I’ll often give up on it, knowing there are more books that are transformative in a spiritual sense than I will ever be able to read.
You didn’t ask for an essay, did you? 😉
That will give me something to ponder! Winkling out the first instances, the subliminal givens, the half-forgotten shifts in direction and perception…..
indeed – I’d love to hear those triggers and redirectors, reinventors in your own process
Love this. Thanks. That’s exactly what I was after – and you’ve hit it on the head with those 3! JJ, Shostakovich & DFW are each inimitable, and each would fall on almost anyone’s list (I wager) of something so different and effective among all things different and potentially effective, that how can one live/read/or create the same after encountering and wrestling and delighting in them? Thanks so much for responding and sharing. I am happy to learn these things. I am also with you – on the “if a book is not transformative to me after a few pages, I’ll give up on it”…that’s a KEY in my opinion to filling one’s life with riches.
any particular works of the cosmological sort that riveted and altered your perspective on everything else?
Works, no. Numbers and images, yes. It’s like when you first try to think in geological time. It takes some serious mental acrobatics at first 🙂
fantastic addition to the concept for me! thanks for sharing and post a few of the numbers or images if you like – would love to encounter them
I can do better than that, my friend! Step outside, find a nice dark spot, lie down, and look up 🙂
🙂