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Thursday, 14 May 2020

The Write Advice 131: CHARLES WEBB


…that's how I view writing and the creative process altogether –– as a personal thing where you need to do something for a reason of your own.  You do it and it's done and what happens afterwards is interesting but not really the important part.
      I've always wanted to be a writer ever since I can remember.  I think I might have wanted to be President before that for a short time, but other than that it's been writing I've always thought about.  I haven't always known what form it would take and I still don't think I've quite reached the form I probably should have reached…

Meeting With An Author [2007 Canal+ documentary]


 

Use the link below to read an article about the life and career of North American novelist CHARLES WEBB, author of The Graduate (1963) and many other fine but now out-of-print novels:

 

 

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/the-strange-destitute-life-of-the-graduate-author-charles-webb/news-story/db361072ea07f7ad7fba9079316f1b27

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 111: ALEC WAUGH

 
The Write Advice 091: BRUCE JAY FRIEDMAN

 
The Write Advice 008: BRIAN MOORE

  

Thursday, 7 May 2020

Poet of the Month 063: GABRIELA MISTRAL

  



GABRIELA MISTRAL
7 April 1889 – 10 January 1957





 
 
 
SLOW RAIN



 
 
This timorous, sorrowful water
Like a child that suffers,
Before it touches the earth,
    Falls fainting.
 

The tree and the wind are quiet
And in the stupendous silence,
These clear and bitter tears
    Keep falling.
 

The sky is like an immense heart
Which opens bitterly.
It does not rain:  it is bleeding, slowly,
    Abundantly.
 

Men indoors at the hearthstone
Feel none of this bitterness,
This gift of sorrowful water
    From above us.
 

This wide and weary descent
Of conquered waters
Toward the earth, reclining
    And exhausted.
 

The lifeless water is falling
As quietly as in a dream,
Like the slight creations
    Dreams are full of.
 

It rains… and like a tragic jackal
Night lies in wait in the mountains.
Out of the earth, in darkness,
    What will rise up?
 

And shall you sleep, while, outside,
This sickly lifeless water of death
    Is falling?



 
 
 
Published May 1943


 
 
 
 
 
 
Translated by 
 
HR HAYS







 

 

 

'Gabriela Mistral' was the pseudonym of Chilean poet, educator, diplomat, social activist and Nobel Prize winner Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga. 

 

Alcayaga was born in the small town of Vicuña on 7 April 1889 and spent her childhood in the village of Monte Grande, nestled in an arid valley of the Andes mountains, where she attended the local primary school run by her sister Emelina who was fifteen years her senior.  Her father, also a teacher who loved to sing and carouse, abandoned his family when she was three years old, returning only rarely to visit his wife and daughters before disappearing for good and probably dying in 1911.  Alcayaga would always recall her days in Monte Grande as an idyllic time of her life where she was able to indulge her lifelong love of nature to her heart's content. 

 

In 1910 she qualified as a teacher, having already spent several years supporting her mother by working as a teaching assistant in the seaside village of Compañia near the southern town of La Serena.  She was also a published writer, with several of her poems appearing in local newspapers in 1904 (when she was just fifteen) and an important if controversial article La instruccíon de la mujer [The Education of Women] following them into print two years later.  The publication of the latter probably explains why she was refused entry to the teaching course at the Normal School in La Serena, its Catholic chaplain marking her out as a potential troublemaker because he considered her so-called 'radical' ideas to be at odds with those of a dutiful Catholic woman and future moulder of young minds.  Alcayaga overcame this setback by studying for and obtaining her teaching certificate on her own, although she remained bitter all her life at being denied such an important educational opportunity.

 

Her lack of formal education did not prevent Alcayaga from rising swiftly through the ranks of the Chilean education system after gaining her teaching credentials.  She was sent to many different parts of Chile to teach and serve as an educational administrator and came to know her country and its inhabitants very well.  She also continued to write, sending several poems and a short story to the Spanish language magazine Elegancias, published in Paris by the Nicaraguan editor Rubén Darío.  Her work appeared in this magazine in 1913 while she was working in a liceo, or high school, in the city of Los Andes –– a six year appointment that allowed her to pay regular visits to the Chilean capital Santiago and participate to some degree in the city's intellectual life.  A year later her collection of poems titled Sonetos de la Muerte [Sonnets of Death], inspired by the suicide of her first love Romelio Ureta in 1909, was awarded first prize in the Juegos Florales, a prestigious national literary contest.  It was after winning this prize that Alcayaga permanently adopted the pseudonym 'Gabriela Mistral,' allegedly created by combining the names of two of her favourite poets, the Italian Gabriele D'Annunzio and the Frenchman Frédéric Mistral.  But this success in no way diminished her devotion to her pupils or prevented her from running the night classes she offered for free to poor workers, none of whom had access to any other form of education. 

 

After spending time in Punta Arenas, the southernmost town in Chile located in the desolate Patagonia region, and then in the largely native community of Temuco (where she encouraged the teenaged Pablo Neruda to pursue his literary ambitions and began a lifelong friendship with him), Alcayaga returned to Santiago where she was appointed principal of the Liceo des Niñas #6 [Girls High School #6].  Although this was a much coveted position, she only remained in the job a year, leaving Chile in 1922 for Mexico where she had accepted an invitation from that country's Minister of Education to help him construct a national education system based upon the successful Chilean model.  

 

Her poems and other writings continued to appear in magazines, newspapers, education journals and literary periodicals, with her showing no interest in publishing a book until Desolacíon [Desolation], featuring some of the bleak poems she had written while living in Punta Arenas, appeared in 1922.  The fact that this collection was published in New York by the Spanish language Instituto de las Españas helped to consolidate her growing international reputation, as did the lectures she gave in several US cities and the time she spent in Europe prior to the publication of her second poetry collection Ternura [Tenderness], which appeared in Madrid in 1924.  Although she returned to Chile in 1925, Alcayaga did not remain at home for long.  With the passing of new government legislation which forbade anybody without a recognized university degree to teach in the national school system, she found herself suddenly jobless and accepted a post at the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation sponsored by the League of Nations.  In early 1926 she left for Paris and a new life of entirely self-imposed exile from her native land.

 

Alcayaga spent the rest of her life combining her work as a poet and essayist with that of a lecturer on education-related subjects and, from 1932 onward, as Chilean consul in cities including Naples, Lisbon, Los Angeles and New York.  Her third volume of poetry, titled Tala, appeared in 1938, with all proceeds from its sale being donated to children orphaned in the Spanish Civil War.  In November 1945 she made history by becoming the first Latin American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, an honour that her former pupil Pablo Neruda would also receive in 1971. 

 

An enthusiastic traveler throughout her life, failing health eventually forced Alcayaga to settle in the New York town of Roslyn with her final female partner Doris Dana.  She was transferred from Roslyn to Hempstead Hospital in New York City where she died, of pancreatic cancer, on 10 January 1957 with Dana, who had been named her literary executor, at her bedside.  Her body was returned to Chile, with its government declaring three days of national mourning which saw her remains visited by thousands of Chileans who rightly considered her a champion of the poor and underprivileged and a legitimate national treasure.


 

 

Use the link below to read more poems by Chilean poet, essayist, educator and diplomat GABRIELA MISTRAL:

 

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gabriela-mistral

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 053: TOETI HERATY

 

 

 
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Poet of the Month 007: ESTHER GRANEK

 

Thursday, 30 April 2020

Some Books About… JOSEPH CONRAD


JOSEPH CONRAD  
3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924



 

 

 

Joseph Conrad, who was born Józef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski on 3 December 1857 in what had recently become the Ukrainian city of Berdyczów, is now considered to be one of the key figures of early literary Modernism, a novelist whose work became a profound influence on many of the writers –– André Gide (who was for a time his French translator), Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway to name just four –– who would themselves go on to become important novelists in the years preceding and immediately following World War One.  While Conrad is perhaps best remembered today as the author of the groundbreaking 1899 novella The Heart of Darkness, it was in his full scale novels Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911) that he can be said to have genuinely pushed the boundaries of the form, creating ironic, multi-layered narratives which dragged the English novel out of its cosy Victorian rectitude into what would prove to be a bleak and frequently terrifying new century.  

 

That Conrad, a Pole by birth whose second language was French, achieved this by writing in his third language (or fourth as there is evidence to suggest that he was also fluent in German) was nothing short of miraculous, as was his apparently instinctual understanding of evil and heroism and the vital role that integrity and personal responsibility play in all human undertakings.  He is the subject of innumerable works of criticism and at least half a dozen major biographies, with the numbers of each growing by the year as critics, cultural as well as literary, continue to mine his work for clues to the various moral and political dilemmas the world still finds itself confronted by today.

 

 



Pelican/Penguin Books UK, 1971

 

 

Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (1960) by JOCELYN BAINES

 

Unlike most literary biographers, Jocelyn Baines was not an academic as such.  He was born in London in the same year that his one and only biographical subject died and worked for most of his professional life as an antiquarian bookseller, leaving that honourable profession for a brief stint as an editor at the English publishing firm of Longmans, Green.  Although he read law at Oxford University and obtained an English degree, his study of Conrad's life –– the first major English biography of the novelist to appear in almost forty years –– is anything but donnish.   

 

The book is divided into fourteen chapters, each of which is further subdivided into sections to facilitate the reading experience and ensure the presentation of facts never becomes so relentless that they can't be easily assimilated.  While this may seem a trivial observation, it is not.  Many literary biographies, particularly those which focus on towering figures like Conrad, can quickly become a drain on the reader's endurance, turning what should be a pleasurable and informative experience into a dull unedifying chore.  Baines presents the facts of Conrad's life –– his birth in a section of Poland which had recently been annexed by Russia, the exile of his father for reasons of political expediency and the deaths of both his parents while he was still a young boy, his struggle to go to sea against the wishes of his autocratic uncle first in France and eventually in England, his gaining of his first (and only) maritime command and subsequent desertion of the sea for what became the even more uncertain career of professional writer –– in a clear straightforward manner, providing enough in the way of supplementary detail to convincingly recreate what, even by action-packed nineteenth and early twentieth century standards, was an extraordinarily rich and fascinating life.  

 

Baines does this, in part, by including a generous selection of quotations drawn from the hundreds if not thousands of letters Conrad wrote throughout his life, including those composed in French to people like Marguerite Poradowska, the Polish-born Belgian novelist who was his maternal cousin by marriage and the woman, nine years his senior, whom he may have unsuccessfully proposed to before marrying Jessie George, eldest daughter of his London landlady, in March 1896.  (Unfortunately, the letters written in French are untranslated, an oversight which should have been corrected in the reprinted edition of the book published in 1993.)  By allowing Conrad to tell key parts of his own story in his own words, Baines provides the reader with unusually lucid insights into his subject's character, state of mind and literary preoccupations.  He also has a gift for analysing Conrad's novels without becoming mired in esoteric academic language, of which his comments about Under Western Eyes should serve as a typically concise example:

 

There is a very successful attempt to present what Razumov [the novel's protagonist] thought … indeed, the characters in Under Western Eyes are more subtly and convincingly developed than those in any other of Conrad's novels.  Razumov himself is the most considerable character that Conrad created; his thoughts, words, and actions reveal depths of personality which show that Conrad succeeded in identifying himself imaginatively with him. 


 

While Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography is not the most erudite book ever published about this great and still much studied novelist, it remains one of the more accessible in terms of style and length.  It's also something practically never encountered in today's cut-throat and rapidly shrinking book market –– a reliable, uncondescending biography written for the non-specialist by a fellow (passionate and well-read) non-specialist that I would unhesitatingly recommend to anybody seeking to broaden their knowledge of Conrad's life as a means of acquiring a deeper understanding of his fiction. 

 

Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography is no longer in print.  

 

 



Ecco Press, 1989

 

 

 

Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924) by FORD MADOX FORD

 

'He was small rather than large in height,' Ford Madox Ford states in the opening paragraph of the monograph he published about his friend and collaborator shortly after Conrad's death on 3 August 1924, '…very broad in the shoulder and long in the arm; dark in complexion with black hair and a clipped black beard.  He had the gestures of a Frenchman who shrugs his shoulders frequently.  When you had really secured his attention he would insert a monocle into his right eye and scrutinise your face from very near as a watchmaker looks into the works of a watchHe entered a room with his head held high, rather stiffly and with a haughty manner, moving his head once semicircularly.  In this one movement he had expressed to himself the room and its contents; his haughtiness was due to his determination to master that room, not to dominate its occupants, his chief passion being the realisation of aspects of himself.'  This is an astonishingly vivid description of Conrad the human being as opposed to Conrad the literary icon, entirely characteristic of Ford and what he set out to achieve in this short, affectionate, elegantly composed memoir. 

 

Ford was the perfect person to write such a book, having collaborated with Conrad on three novels –– The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903) and The Nature of a Crime (written in 1906 but published, like this memoir, in 1924) –– after being introduced to him in 1898 by Conrad's friend and literary advisor Edward Garnett.  Theirs quickly became a mutually instructive friendship which naturally lent itself to collaboration and the perfecting of a literary technique that Conrad had dubbed 'progression d'effet' or, in English, progression of effect.  'In writing a novel,' Ford explains, 'we agreed that every word set on paper –– every word set on paper –– must carry the story forward and, that as the story progressed, the story must be carried forward faster and faster and with more and more intensity.'  This method of writing, which became a core principle of what would come to be known as literary impressionism (and the modern spy and detective novel), is now considered to be one of Conrad's most essential contributions to Western literature –– a contribution it may have been impossible for him to make had he not met and worked so closely with the man he originally knew as Ford Madox Hueffer.  (Ford changed his surname after World War One in an effort to re-invent himself following his military service in the trenches of France and the entirely understandable nervous breakdown he suffered as a result of that altogether horrific experience.)

 

Although their friendship was no longer as close by 1909 –– it became strained after they quarrelled about Conrad's contributions to The English Review, a new periodical Ford was at that time editing, and was further compromised by the affair the still-married Ford had recently begun with journalist Violet Hunt –– Ford's genuine affection for Conrad and his memories of the many hours they spent discussing the art and practise of writing at Pent Farm in rural Kent shines through on every page.  It closes with a moving addendum, composed in (again untranslated) French, of Ford's thoughts written immediately after learning of Conrad's death that originally appeared in the Journal Littéraire on 26 August 1924.

 

As generous and laudatory as it is, Ford's memoir was vehemently disliked by the widow of his friend and former collaborator.  Jessie Conrad –– who would go on to write several newspaper articles and two interesting if unreliable memoirs of her own about the husband whose genius she claimed not to have understood –– never warmed to Ford, whom she considered too bohemian in his outlook in addition to being a shameless exploiter of Conrad's overly generous nature.  She publicly criticized Ford after his memoir appeared, going so far as to describe his reminiscences as 'detestable' to one Fleet Street journalist.  

 

Personally, I think Mrs Conrad got it wrong.  For all his faults, of which he possessed as many as the next person, Ford could not count insincerity or the failure to pay his friends due homage among them.  A Personal Remembrance stands as an eloquent heartfelt tribute to a man he genuinely respected and admired and what they accomplished as novelists both individually and collectively. 

 

Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online provider.  

 

Joseph Conrad As I Knew Him (1927) and Joseph Conrad and His Circle (1935), both written by JESSIE CONRAD, are long out of print, as is Joseph Conrad: Times Remembered the better memoir by the writer's youngest son JOHN CONRAD published by the Cambridge University Press in 1981. 





Farrar Straus Giroux first US edition, 1979

 

 

Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (1979) by FREDERICK R KARL

 

It is hard to believe that this was only the third Conrad biography published since the writer's death, following the previously mentioned work by Jocelyn Baines and Gérard Jean-Aubry's Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters (1927) and Vie de Conrad (1947, translated ten years later as The Sea-Dreamer: A Definitive Biography of Joseph Conrad).  What Baines lacked in detail and Jean-Aubry lacked in verisimilitude –– although he knew Conrad and translated much of his work into French, the Frenchman had a worrying tendency to extrapolate Conrad's fiction into his life and vice versa, making many of his claims and assumptions unreliable –– Frederick R Karl more than made up for in this massive tome, a book which remains one of the truly great literary biographies and a landmark of modern literary scholarship.

 

A critic of no small repute and a published novelist in his own right, Karl combines extensive research with a keen appreciation of Conrad's literary achievements and scrupulous analysis of his subject's novels, short stories, memoirs and even the three plays he wrote in his always urgent quest to obtain a steady source of income for his family.  He depicts Conrad's life as a voyage of discovery divided into three distinct but overlapping phases –– the young self-exiled Pole struggling to find a purpose and make his way in the world, the apprentice seaman who taught himself to speak and read English and rose through the ranks of the British merchant service to become master of the Otago in 1885 only to be denied the captaincy he undoubtedly deserved, and finally the writer who faced a different kind of struggle to earn enough by his pen to support his ailing wife and sons. 

 

Building upon what was unearthed by Conrad's previous biographers, Karl refutes many of their unsubstantiated claims (particularly those of Jean-Aubry) while confirming and elaborating on others, doing it all in a style that never patronizes the reader or becomes so academic as to become off-putting or tedious to read.  He is refreshingly honest about the uneven quality of much of Conrad's later output, unafraid to state which, in his view, are his important works and which, like his last published novel The Rover (1923), would probably not have seen the light of day had their author not been so chronically strapped for cash throughout so much of his career. 

 

The Three Lives was recognised as the masterpiece it is by many leading reviewers of the day, including Anthony Burgess who described it as '…a model of American scholarship in which not even the most recherché reference has gone unresearchedIt tells the story of a very sad man, a hopeless warrior, and of the heroinism of a wife who… suffered not only in herself but for him.'  There have, of course, been many other Conrad biographies published since 1979 but none, I dare to venture, that compare with Professor Karl's work in terms of erudition and sheer attention to detail.  

 

Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives is no longer in print. 

 

FREDERICK R KARL was the co-editor, with his colleague LAURENCE DAVIES, of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad which were published in nine volumes by the Cambridge University Press between 1983 and 2007.

 

 
 


Oxford University Press, 2000

 

 

Oxford Reader's Companion to Conrad (2000) by OWEN KNOWLES and GENE MOORE [editors]

 

This slim but densely packed book, first published in hardback by the Oxford University Press in 2000, is aptly named.  Edited by two of the world's leading Conrad scholars, with contributions from four of their colleagues including Zdzislaw Najder who was Conrad's first Polish biographer, it delivers exactly what its title promises –– an easy to use, cross-referenced guide to its subject's life and career which provides effective short analyses of all his published works (no story, tale, novel, play or significant piece of journalism or non-fiction is omitted), including summaries of their plots, overviews of past and current critical responses along with many helpful suggestions for further reading.  

 

This is the book I find myself automatically reaching for when I need further information regarding a particular point of Conrad's life or work.  (This post would have been difficult to write without it.)  It is informative, concise and helpfully separated into categories like 'Private Life and Attitudes,' 'Reputation' and 'Critical Approaches' which make it an indispensable research tool for the scholar and non-specialist alike.  It also contains a well-structured chronology, a family tree and four maps of, respectively, Conrad's divided Poland, Conrad's Malay Archipelago (the setting for Lord Jim and much of his finest short fiction), the River Congo (the setting for The Heart of Darkness and a river he personally navigated in 1890 as first mate of the paddle steamer Roi des Belges) and his various Homes in southeast England.  What more could any Conrad enthusiast reasonably expect from a reference book?  This truly is a work designed for the so-called 'ordinary reader' (if there is such a thing), dating from a time before the internet became the preferred source of information not just about literature but about everything else on our factoid obsessed planet. 

 

The Oxford Reader's Companion to Joseph Conrad may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online provider.

 

 
 
 
 
THE JOSEPH CONRAD SOCIETY is a UK-based organisation (with an allied branch in North America) devoted to 'the study of all aspects of the writings and life of Joseph Conrad' that also aims to 'provide a forum and resource for Conrad scholars throughout the world and those with a strong interest in things Conradian.'
 


 

 

 

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The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907) by JOSEPH CONRAD

 
 

The Write Advice 118: JOSEPH CONRAD

 
 

A Call: The Tale of Two Passions (1910) by FORD MADOX FORD

 

 

 

 

Last updated 30 September 2021

Tuesday, 21 April 2020

Words for the Music 017: SANDY DENNY


SANDY DENNY
6 January 1947 – 21 April 1978





WHO KNOWS WHERE THE TIME GOES?
SANDY DENNY
John Peel Session – BBC Radio
11 September 1973





WHO KNOWS WHERE THE TIME GOES?


Across the evening sky 
All the birds are leaving
But how they can know 
It's time for them to go
Before the winter fire 
I shall still be dreaming
I do not count the time

For who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

Sad deserted shore 
Your fickle friends are leaving
Ah but then you know 
It's time for them to go
But I shall still be here 
I have no thought of leaving
I have no thought of time

For who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

And I am not alone 
While my love is near me
And I know it shall be so 
Until it's time to go
So come the storms of winter 
And then the birds in spring again
I do not fear the time

For who knows how my love grows?
And who knows where the time goes?




Words and music by Sandy Denny
© 1967 Sony/ATV & Universal Music Publishing






Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny, who was born in the London suburb of Merton Park on 6 January 1947, was another supremely gifted human being who proved unable to curb her appetite for wilful self-destruction.  Her 1978 death, several weeks after falling down a flight of stairs in the Cornwall holiday home belonging to her parents, was the culmination of years of protracted drug and alcohol abuse and came as a profound if not entirely unexpected shock to her friends and former bandmates in The Strawbs, Fairport Convention and Fotheringay.  As Dave Swarbrick, one of those former bandmates, recalled: '…Looking back I think she was suffering from some kind of post-natal problem.  I very much regret that it wasn't picked up by me.  She was drinking and taking coke and smoking dope.  She wasn't happy in her marriage; it wasn't going anywhere but down.  I think suspicion ate her.  I feel as if she left mid-sentence and I mourn her leaving almost daily.'

While Denny's is not a story of talent completely wasted –– she made dozens of fine recordings, many of which are justifiably considered to be impeccable examples of traditional British folk and folk-rock at their best –– it is a story of talent misdirected and, to a certain degree, misunderstood by her various record companies and, more tragically, by herself.  Her career always seemed to lack a clear sense of direction, costing her the opportunity to become the household name that everyone who worked with her believed and agreed she deserved to become.

Who Knows Where The Times Goes? is perhaps her most famous original song, a haunting blend of her majestically expressive voice, a subtle modal melody and her restrained plain-spoken lyrics.  It's the apparently seamless blending of these elements which give the song its power, evoking a mood of aching wistfulness that lingers in the mind long after its final note has faded.  

For me Denny's lyrics can stand comparison with the work of great English poets like Thomas Hardy and AE Housman. There's a similar emphasis on contrasting the behaviour of the natural world with the narrator's state of mind, the passing of the seasons directly equated with the difficult to accept but nevertheless inevitable passing of time.  The imagery is as sparse as the music, demanding the listener's attention and effortlessly retaining it from beginning to end.  Very few singers are capable of achieving this using only their voice and an acoustic guitar.  Many try, but few succeed because a special kind of talent is required –– a talent Sandy Denny possessed in obvious abundance.

 

Use the link below to visit the website of British singer/songwriter SANDY DENNY (1947–1978):
 


 

Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.

 

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Last updated 12 October 2021 §

Thursday, 16 April 2020

Think About It 054: DOROTHY ROWE


When reality becomes too much to bear we can comfort ourselves with fantasies, which is wise provided we remember that the stories we tell ourselves are fantasies.  If we fail to do this, if we think that our fantasies are real and true, we join the forces of unreason.  In the ranks of therapists there are some who do just this.  They develop a logic which conveniently ignores those constructions which do not fit their theories and thus they collude with the forces of unreason...
        Such collusion seems on many occasions to go beyond a mere failure of nerve. It seems instead to be an inability to understand and accept the peculiarity of our existence.
        This peculiarity is that, while the world we live in seems to be solid and real and shared with others, what we each experience is our individual construction.  We can imagine events which occur without any relationship to us, but what we have is not knowledge about such events but theories about such events.  In fact, everything we know is a theory, a construction, and this construction is inside our head...[and] our construction can come from nowhere other than our past experience, and no two people, not even identical twins, have the same experience.

The Comforts of Unreason (1997)


 

Use the link below to read the full 1997 article The Comforts of Unreason posted on the website of Australian psychologist DOROTHY ROWE:

 

http://www.dorothyrowe.com.au/articles/book-introductions/item/321-chapter-8-the-comforts-of-unreason-in-living-together-ed-david-kennard-and-neil-small-quartet-books-1997

 

 

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Think About It 043: KAREN HORNEY