Unlike anything else every written, and not only one ventures to guess by John O'Loughlin, this title endeavours to 'burn the candle', as it were, at both ends, coming 'down to earth' in the first part and going 'up to heaven' in the second, replicating the text of the former while diverging from it in terms of an approach to structure which is less prosaic than philosophic, in the sense of combining, and not for the first time in his oeuvre, aphorisms with maxims in relation to a metaphysical mean and intent. The aphoristic material, with him, is more loosely structured than the maxims, which are not maxims in the accepted sense of pithy sayings or apophthegms in which wisdom or knowledge is condensed but, rather, are numbered items that follow, in each sequence, a uniform structure which is simply thematically modified to suit the needs of the occasion or, in this instance, particular maxim. That, of course, does not obtain in the 'down to earth' part which begins this book, in which the author took the aphoristic/maximistic material at a less developed stage of its structuring and simply endeavoured, with the help of '....', or omission marks used in a relatively unorthodox way, to separate one train of thought from another, to turn it into something approaching prose, in which a massive if not massed approach to text signifies that which is corporeal as opposed, like the aphoristic structure, to being comparatively ethereal, and thus intended (without irony) for mass consumption – something one could not associate with any text conceived with due philosophic regard to space and, especially, time. Thus this project strives to appeal, one might say, to both lower- and upper-class taste to the extent that it combines, in the one book, two dissimilar approaches to textual structure without, however, unduly departing from its grammatical bias and the affirmation, in consequence, of a discriminatory upper-case approach (depending on class context) to terminology which, to be sure, would tend to partly contradict or at least detract from our metaphor concerning the 'candle' being burnt at 'both ends', as initially suggested. However that may be, while more people might be expected to prefer the 'prose' to the 'philosophy', irrespective of its grammatical predilections, the option on both approaches to textual presentation not only brings 'heaven' down to 'earth' but simultaneously ensures that what pertains to the former can be transmuted into the latter, transfigured, so to speak, with intent to providing the right kind of axial paradigm for any transcendence of 'the world' likely to culminate in a heavenly disposition. - A Centretruths editorial.
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