@The Pentacle Queen,
I'll have a go then.
There's certain facts to be considered-
1-- Queenie's admitted track record which, for those who don't keep up, is fairly lurid and, academically, quite admirable.
2- Her signature line.
3- Her second post on this thread plus its title.
4- Her cave thing about Plato in another place.
So- I remembered Prof Erich Heller's discussion of Thomas Mann's book The Magic Mountain. I shall quote a few bits from it.
Quote:The story, at that point, is about Hans Castorp's deepening infatuation with Clavdia (Chauchat), his desire which in all its sensuality is yet something 'exceedingly elusive and tenuous', a mere thought or even dream, 'the terrifying and yet infinitely alluring dream of a young man' whose world has hitherto offered him 'nothing but a hollow silence as its answer to certain questions he unconsciously asked'.
The inner quotes are from Mann.
Quote:It might not have happened, says Thomas Mann, 'hazarding a surmise', (as am doing here), if Hans Castorp's ' simple soul had received from the age in which he lived some even faintly satisfactory suggestion concerning the point and purpose of the business of living'.
Quote:Now, is it the 'hollow silence' which is the great calamity?
Quote:An age which, bustling with activity, is yet immediately beneath its energetic surface 'palpably hopeless, clueless and helpless' is calamitous enough.
Quote:I think you made the mistake then of blaming The Magic Mountain, or its author, for the age that is the theme of the book.
(As it is the theme of A2K)
Quote: Question: So it is the age after all.
Answer: Undeniably so. For what I meant to say was that The Magic Mountain is about an age dispossessed of the very sense of definable meaning. Therefore all things are free to acquire whatever meaning they choose. Nothing is what it seems.
Question: Put like that, it sounds like the old predicament; Plato throughout the ages. Appearence and Reality.
Answer: Your own denunciation of European literature from the Symbolists to Thomas Mann suggests that it is more like Plato at the end of his tether: Appearances and no Reality. Hence any appearance may at any moment behave as if it had the sole claim on reality, saying, as it were: 'If anything were real , I should be the only real thing.' It is a mescalin world: the red of this tulip would be the essence of reality if reality had any essence, and essence any reality. As it is, we are merely the occasional victims of intoxication, whether it is spirit, mescalin, or art.
Girls are brought up today, particularly only ones, to think of themselves as princesses and encouraged to have a romantic cast of mind. But where are the jousting knights to do battle for their honour?
Like Hans they dream and then the grow up. And the honest ones say "blow my mind".
Quote:"He comes with western winds, with evening`s wandering airs,
With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars.
Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,
And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire.
Emily Bronte. ( She was born too soon and I was born too late--blame it on the simple twist of fate.)
If one is asked for a REALLY radical philosophy please--that will outdo an acid tab, by someone who not only seeks to exhaust the realm of the possible but wants to pack explosives into a crevice and have the cave expanded , one can hardly be doing one's duty to come up with something out of a woman's magazine.
