APPENDIX
(RANDOM THOUGHTS)
1. Fireworks strike me as a species of
sublimated barbarism, something that, as a rule, appeals to only the most
superficial and extrovert of people.
2. Heathenistic
countries, with their female bias, almost invariably have red, white, and blue
in their flags.
3. Watching television is pretty much the modern
equivalent of staring into the fire, and only really appeals to those for whom
the fascination of evil is too powerful to resist.
4. Most people are not interested in poetry or
philosophy, because the majority of people are men and women, not devils and
gods.
5. There is, at times, more philosophy in
Baudelaire's Intimate
Journals than in Nietzsche's Zarathustra, and this in spite of Baudelaire's reputation as
a poet.
6. The twentieth
century was more receptive, by and large, to poets than to philosophers, and
not a few of the latter, including T.S. Eliot, opted to become poets - with
predictable consequences!
7 Unlike Nietzsche,
who might be said to have twisted philosophy towards poetry, Ezra Pound developed
the knack of twisting poetry towards philosophy - without, however, ceasing to
be a poet!
8. Just as a dramatist should, when genuine, be
more biased towards poetry than towards philosophy, so a novelist should, when
true, be more biased towards philosophy than towards
poetry.
9. Examples of the former include Shakespeare
and Oscar Wilde. Examples of the latter
include Aldous Huxley and John Fowles.
10. Poetic novelists, like Hesse,
are as paradoxical as philosophic dramatists, like Sartre.
11. Of course, Sartre was more than a dramatist,
but also considerably less than a philosopher, if by philosophy one means the
aphoristic pursuit of truth in the interests of metaphysical being.
12. Civilization turns against barbarism as
strength against beauty, quantity against appearance, water against fire; for
civilization is jealous of any threat posed by barbarism to nature which might
detract from, if not effectively exclude, its own dominion over nature, even to
the exclusion of culture.
