The Early Days of a Better Nation |
Ken MacLeod's comments. “If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders Contact: kenneth dot m dot macleod at gmail dot com Blog-related emails may be quoted unless you ask otherwise.
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Saturday, July 16, 2011
Consider Wilson on Roquentin, the narrator of Sartre's novel La Nausée: 'Roquentin feels insignificant before things. Without the meaning his Will would normally impose on it, his existence is absurd. Causality - Hume's bugbear - has collapsed; consequently there are no adventures.' It's the aside - 'Hume's bugbear' - that does the trick. Years later, you'll read Hume and marvel. Likewise the capitalization of 'Will'. This isn't any old will, you see, the kind that gets you and me out of bed in the morning - no, it's the Will of Schopenhauer's Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, to whose 'formidable dialectical apparatus' Wilson has given a nod and a passing wave a few pages earlier. In his long, frank and often (sometimes intentionally) funny autobiography, Dreaming to Some Purpose (Arrow, 2004), Colin Wilson explains the genesis of his extraordinary first book, published when he was twenty-five years old and a complete unknown who had left school at sixteen. He really had read all the books he cites, and thought about them at length. He'd written about them, in his journals and notebooks, for over a decade, meanwhile endlessly drafting and redrafting his first novel. In the process, he accomplished in passing the key requirement for becoming a publishable writer: write a million words. ('Of crap', I sometimes add, by way of encouragement, because that's what mine were.) The Outsider was an overnight success, but the high-brow critics who'd praised it to the skies soon woke up with a hang-over. Wilson, it turned out, wasn't Britain's answer to Sartre and Camus. None of them, as far as I know, put their finger on what he actually was. Far from being a charlatan, Wilson was an intelligent and sincere young man who read more than enough to put most undergraduates to shame, but who'd never had what a university education could have given him: a training in critical thinking. Instead, he tried to make everything he read fit together and make a coherent story. I did the same myself at the time I read The Outsider, at the age of sixteen. Many of us do. Wilson went on writing, about a hundred books, about everything: astronomy, crime, the occult, psychology, philosophy, sex, wine, music, UFOs ... always with the same theme as his first. He enjoyed a second success with The Occult, sometimes with the same critics, who this time should have been even more ashamed of themselves afterwards, but weren't. I've always admired him; for his optimism, his enthusiasm, his energy, his self-belief. In one of his many books he says that it's better to think you're a genius when you're not than to think you're not when you are. There's no doubt on which side he falls. His autobiography is genuinely engaging and inspiring. If I could sincerely write a cult book a tenth as good in its way as The Outsider I'd do it in a heartbeat, if only for the money - another subject on which Wilson is eloquent, and unsparing of his own blushes. Ideas, people, ideas! What's the world waiting to hear about from me? Labels: amazing things, reviews, writing 19 Comments:Though his reviewers, who presumably *did* go to university, also seem to have suffered from a lack of critical thinking.
"Ideas, people, ideas! What's the world waiting to hear about from me?"
Only tangentially related, but my favorite cult book would have to be The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, read as a teenager after reading Stephenson's riffing on it. Still the most interestingly wrong thing I think I've ever read. It was Von Daniken for me as well. There was a time when my thirteen year old self actually bought into the idea of human civ as a by-product alien intervention. I still remember, even after so many years, how spectacularly mind-blowing that was. Good times...
I think you could write a killer book about determinism and its implications for religious belief, science and politics*, if you could get to the point of seeing it from outside.
Francis Wheen wrote a terse biography of Marx! I read "The Outsider" when I was too young to know much about the thinkers and ideas it describes, but I remember liking it. Years later I read "The Mind Parasites" and loved it. It's the most improbable mixture of notions in SF that I know of. The abstract, technical, philosophy of mind, Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, used to develop the psychic power to repel an invasion of purely mental beings. Using phenomenology this way was an audacious move. For Husserl developed it to study the mind, by thinking about its thinking. What this had to do with mental defence was not explained, yet it was so neat that I read it twice.
I saw through Von Danikan early on but fell for Bucky Fuller who generated genuinely interesting technology from crackpot ideology, and Paolo Soleri who generated genuinely interesting architectural proposals from a rather different crackpot ideology. It took me a long time to understand that Soleri's teology was as full of unproven assumptions Von Danikan ; that Fuller's anti-political variation on technocracy was actually an intensely political viewpoint; that further Fuller's preference for a good story over a factual basis was a poor basis for construction useful theories.
TJ: thanks for the suggestions, which have set off some interesting lines of thought. Re Marx, there are plenty of good introductions already, and as Mirk has said, Francis Wheen's biography is short and readable - journalistic, not very deep, but for that reason entertaining too.
"Ideas people, ideas! What do people want to hear from me?"
Ken - thinking of your comment back here: Ugh, URL swallowed. Comments are related to this post.
Phil - I'm afraid that with that anecdote I more or less shot my bolt on the subject, but I'll go on thinking about it.
"Ideas people, ideas! What do people want to hear from me?" ejh - not at all. Castenada and von Daniken wrote several successful sequels to their first big-hit books. Regarding Marx bios, Wheen's is good, but my favorite is Mary Gabriel's Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution.
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>>>>In one of his many books he says that it's better to think you're a genius when you're not than to think you're not when you are.
I wish I'd thought of that!
By D.J.P. O'Kane, at Saturday, July 16, 2011 4:36:00 pm