More Time to Read
I wish I gave myself more time to read for pleasure. Plunked down in front of a computer screen for most of the day reading and writing, I look forward to something else at the end of the day. Regrettably, there’s next to nothing on the idiot box, so I often wind up either back here ticklin’ the ivories, or watching something unworthy of my attentions.
But over the past coupla months, I’ve read some of the latest work of my three favorite authors. Kurt Vonnegut’s "Timequake", Robert A. Johnson’s "Balancing Heaven and Earth", and Robertson Davies’ "Happy Alchemy".
This latter book is a compilation of essays and other short works assembled after his death by the daughter and wife of a man I think is the finest writer since Shakespeare. At least in English. A Canadian, Davies had three careers — in the theater, as a newspaper editor/publisher, and a teacher. He writes with a flowery terseness that sets standards for reportage and esoterica, at the same time. More than a writer, he is a thinker of unconscionable glory. That one man would be required to process such quantity of supremely quality work is daunting to conceive. For instance, "The perfectibility of the human race will be achieved, if it ever is achieved, by intelligent indirection, rather than by ill-understood legislation."
I fell for Vonnegut in 1969. He’d already written a significant body of work, including "Welcome to the Monkey House", one of the finest collections of short stories you shall ever come upon. That all 23 stories are from the same mind is marvelously exciting; as with Davies and Shakespeare, it says what is possible. Frequently, and in "Timequake", Vonnegut visits us with a science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout. A Troutism: "I could have written a best-seller, if I’d had the patience to create three-dimensional characters."
"Balancing Heaven and Earth" — what a concept. While we’re still alive, you mean? Johnson is a Jungian therapist lecturer who wrote ten seminal books related to 20th century consciousness and myth. "She", which illuminates the feminine psychology through the myth of Aphrodite and Psyche, and "We", which explains romantic love through the myth of Tristan and Isolde, are two of the most important books I’ve ever read. Quoting, "As the greatest mythologist Joseph Campbell once pointed out, the celebrity lives only for his or her own ego, while the hero acts to redeem society."
Johnson’s ideas are almost-magical keys to the kingdom of understanding who we are, and how we function as human beings. Consider, "A proverb puts it this way: in life our task is to go from unconscious perfection to conscious imperfection and then to conscious perfection."
Vonnegut, for all his stylistic quirkiness, delivers an imperative to keep the mind awake and the soul alive. He observed, "...by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about."
Davies guides us into the Unconscious — into Jung’s "collective unconscious" — where we resonate — cognitively and intuitively — with primal understanding that there is a grand design of some sort. "Of course," wrote Davies, "fairies are all imported in North America. We have no native fairies. The Little People do not long survive importation — unless they go to California and grow large and beautiful, but haven’t much flavour, like the fruit and the film stars."
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.