A PERSONAL JOURNEY My early inner life was a gift to myself alone – always on my own. Father off in India somehow defending the freedom of UK, as they say about foreign escapades nowadays; mother consumed by worry for my sister who was starting the awful disease from which she eventually died in 2005. […]
In Restless Human Hearts (1875), after their trial marriage and disappointing continental trip, Neville and Georgiana are reflecting separately on the concern they feel about their future: Georgie wants the ‘transports of love’ she and Neville had at the beginning of their relationship, while Neville requires something else. “I think,” said Neville, speaking in a […]
There are moments in our lives that stand out clear and shining against the sun of the soul, and in those moments the Being becomes suffused by a radiant light. This light blots out for a time the dark texture of the years through which we have passed. The soul becomes charged with new life […]
“We’re talking too much,” [Demian] said with unusual seriousness. “There’s no point in clever talk, none at all. It only leads you away from yourself. Going away from yourself is a sin. What we need to do is crawl entirely into the self, like a turtle.” Hermann Hesse: Demian There is no reality except the […]
At the end of Rain Upon Godshill (1939) JBPriestley tells us that he had been thinking about ‘the chapters of a story, based on an idea I had had for years…’ In nineteen days after returning from a rough excursion in Arizona to the ranch where they were staying he had written The Doomsday Men […]
ON ‘THE ESSAY’ Why do I call these posts ‘globs’? Because I wish to dissociate myself from the word ‘blogs’ – they are essays – but that’s a word distinctly out of fashion… From September1968, at the beginning of my time of being what’s called a ‘teacher’, I taught briefly (though it seemed like forever) […]
Early on in The Fox in the Attic Richard Hughes steps aside from his narrative to consider how the experience of the First World War played on the consciousness of those who were alive at the time. I understand this completely: reviewing my own war-time experience at the age of 3 to 8 (!) I […]
I’ve been pondering the idea Gurdjieff/Ouspensky, refer to as ‘Magnetic Centre’, a certain something-or-other inside us that plays some part in the development and maintenance of enhanced consciousness in human life. It sounds very elitist but in the circumstances of life as we find them, it is an objective fact that only a very few […]
‘I believe I’m on a train going to Colchester…’ At the time of writing with a fountain pen that certainly was the case: I could feel the train wheels doing just what they were supposed to do and I felt the periodic jolts, slowings down and gettings faster. But to use the words ‘I believed […]
It’s late October 2019. Time for re-reading The Four Men yet again is fast approaching. I want to get my series of writings on him done by Halloween. Unless they are similarly obsessed I can’t imagine anybody being interested in any of this, or in my quest, on the face of it, anyway, one from […]
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