Category Archive: METAPHYSICS
The Children’s Hospital
(C. Adrian) O you lovely book! From the first, gasping, rolling hurtling minutes, through the green fire and the black death to the final sad biblical parade, I love all of your pages.
Continue Reading →The Trial
(by Franz Kafka) An offense to natural justice, this nightmare procedural (originally entitled ‘The Process’) has K finding all about how but nothing about why. Kafka’s famous novel interprets both the times and the inhumanity of the human condition.
Continue Reading →Sweet Dreams
(by Michael Frayn) Highly original and amusing satire of a bespoke heaven for boyish, middle management men of early middle age and their moral crises as the right hands of god. You can see the influence cast by this book on, for example, Douglas Adams. The chaps, all from Cambridge naturally, are no longer scholars but creators, and they have an easy, breezy, Ian Fleming style way with women and imagine themselves to be radicals, even the lukewarm Head Man, in that smug, cosy, implacable bourgeois way, a la J. P. Sartre. The heavenly staples – taramasalata, gigot aux haricots…
Continue Reading →The Screwtape Letters
(by C.S. Lewis) Lewis was unsurpassed in winkling out a small dark corner of the soul and blowing it into toxic glasswork. Here we have one-way correspondence from a demon, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood: a how-to manual for those who would catch our souls. Exquisite, even for those without the gift of faith. My favourite lesson concerns the lady who quails at that offered, wheedling for “all I want…”. Screwtape’s comment: “Because what she wants is…less…than what has been set before her, she never recognises as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others.” This…
Continue Reading →The Problem of Knowledge
(by A.J. Ayer) Ayer is a blind alley, albeit a convincing one. Yet logic and semantics will take us only so far and reading him, one thinks, “you’re too clever by half…..too clever for our good.” We recently had a comment (by someone with the nom de plume “Butt Books”, has commented fit for posterity: “True – logic and semantics will take us only so far. The analytic tradition won’t venture into the realm of speculative metaphysics, obscurantism, and autofellatio. One must turn to the continental tradition for that.“
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