PREFACE
The only reason there is an orange
notebook 3 and not a green notebook 3 in this literary project having markedly
philosophical overtones is that the first orange notebook was already over
two-thirds full with previous literary material when I began to use it for this
project, and that, since I wanted a balance, as far as possible, between the
green and orange notebooks, both in terms of length and amount and quality of
material contained within each of them, I opted to fill about two-thirds of a third
orange notebook in my possession in order to compensate for the comparative
brevity of the first notebook, thereby presenting the reader with approximately
as much orange notebook material overall as green notebook material, but
without any intention of suggesting a bias towards the orange at the expense of
the green simply on account of the partially-filled additional orange notebook.
The results, overall, are pretty interchangeable, in any case, since I did not
consciously attempt to think or write, from an Irish standpoint, in a more
'green' way with the green notebooks or in a more 'orange' way with the orange
ones, even if sometimes a bias towards one or the other tendency could be
inferred. What I wanted, and I believe achieved, was a framework that allowed
me to think and write freely without undue concessions to either colour (or
ethnicity), and somehow I succeeded, even at this late stage in my literary
vocation, in both correcting a fairly long-standing philosophic error of logic
(which need not be addressed here, since it will become fairly self-evident
later on) and extending my philosophy to embrace an entirely new perspective
which I believe to be of seminal importance in both understanding and defining
contemporary civilization as an extension of Western civilization, whether or
not one relates to it or has any ancestral connections with it. And I have
achieved all this within a relatively short project, one which transcends the
conventional printerly book bias towards volume, not
to say mass, in the interests of aphoristic brevity and metaphysical
credibility within a literary framework more suited, I believe, to eBook
publication on the Internet, not to say to philosophical truth, even with other
considerations, often of a quite literary and even entertaining nature, that
had to be considered along the largely time/pseudo-space way in which the
subject of 'reservations', amounting to the thematic leitmotif of this project,
was duly investigated from a number of angles in both the orange and green
notebooks, with a view to enhancing my understanding of what it means to be
'reserved'.
John O'Loughlin,
