-- Arthur Koestler
I am getting what I always expected of literature. But this week it lies heavy on my mind. I am in three books now, one biography and two fictions. Warburg goes slowly and sporadically, but I am halfway done with LeCarre. It is my first LeCarre and it is surprisingly eloquent and dark. Koestler is my nighttime companion and I woke this morning to check on Rubashov, his prisoner.
All three share the echoes of WW2, of war and revolution, of alienation and the burdens that fall to people in recognition of treachery and incalculable loss. Humanity seems to become something altogether unrecognizably ridiculous in the luxury of peace. But at least during peacetime we can ignore their inversions and folly. But here are sentences with the subtext of death and torture. It is so dark.
Even in my gaming I have been running from ax weilding shadows, fighting with a flashlight and imagination. My machine failed and now Alan Wake's inception lies in yet another, deeper dreamtime.
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Literature serves to provide a language of culture. I embrace the works of authors which stand on their evocative merits as they provide a theme for understanding human action in society. The great writer has in his craft the power to move men through inspiration in ways the social scientist cannot. I think of the socialist's grasping ambition as he plies his most elementary trade, the rousing speech in front of mobs, to bypass the critical consideration of a sophisticated mind and appeal to the power hungry sentiment of revolution and its snitty, anal-retentive kid brother, reform. They go for the guns. They go for the grants. They hijack the institutions leaving the mind in the body of the handcuffed population. The social scientist's time is always now. The artist of literature is always timeless. Man comes around to wisdom by his own initiative, but the books of categorization require enforcement.
That's what I see in the big seven dollar words. And I have spun a few theories around here, but only for explication. I no longer have the humor of my old comic strips. I don't know why.
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