second thoughts

I don't care much for the times we're living in.
--from The Time Machine.

Was on Facebook for an hour (shudder). If you're going to be seduced, it should at least be by something beautiful.One-liners are fine if you're Wilde-but even that gets tiresome after a while.

Second thoughts.

Thank God!Re-vision. Iris M.

When the child was a child old Frithjof was deep, very deep(you still love his book on the 'Red Man', The Feathered Sun-as much for the pictures as anything else).

There was this:

"...whereas in the Middle Ages novels still drew their inspiration from myths, legends, and religious and chivalrous ideals, they [novelists] became from a certain period onwards more profane, even garrulous and insignificant...

Literary realism is truly subversive because it aims at reducing reality to the vilest contingencies of nature or chance, instead of leading it back to its archetypes...in short, to the essential."

Well, all heady stuff if you're a teenager (not that you were looking for anything in particular-good ol' Kashmiri laziness saved you there!). But I guess there's a pessimistic side to life that thinks profundity goes hand in hand with sadness, suffering, or a generally negative stance to the dull, bourgeois, disenchanted world that is 'the world'. Anyone who's never dreamt of escaping hasn't, surely, lived or understood? Whither shall I flee? (Tillich seemed to make sense then, and Hesse too: 'the desire to sleep overcame all desires').

Some uneasy feeling always tugged at you, though. Something too fanatical and stark about absolutes, perfection, essence, renunciation. There was no one thing. And

Finitude is not a misfortune.
--The Allama.

All this talk of 'the spiritual'..there was only one thing worse: the search for it. Notions like the 'timeless east' were laughable, utterly fake,as was this silly veneration for 'the Past' and Tradition. Try something a bit simpler like running water, local justice,education, citizenship...'existence precedes essence'.

Not that this was anti-religious. But such talk and terminology doesn't interest me anyway. 'Religious' and conservative people are insufferable bores.

Anyways, I've come to enjoy reading fiction a lot more. Recently picked up Stoner (highly recommended by anton), Fred Exley's 'A Fan's Notes' (one of Richard Ford's top books), Updike's Rabbit Redux book.

E.M.F:

The portrayal of life by values replaced by the portrayal of life by time.

Yes, that seems to be it. Individual experience, unique, new, novel...the broken circle. God, you can't even read Ouspensky on Icons any more.

He who vilifies time, vilifies His Lord.
--a Prophetic saying (quoted in 'The Reconstruction')

What is truly subversive is how the men in hats denigrate reality, substitute the universal, the abstract, for particularities, the concrete.