Reinforcing my need to switch off and “just write something”, is that everything I read (or listen or watch) triggers connections between existing and new source materials, adding to that never ending reading list. This happened in microcosm in the last few days.
My immediate previous post, was a reference to Arthur Koestler, of whose “The Sleepwalkers” I was already a fan, thanks to Dave Snowden recommending Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon”. I added a kindle copy of that to my collection, and started to read, already two levels of interrupt beyond Tolstoy’s “War & Peace” and Teffi’s (Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya) “Subtly Worded”. These themselves prompted by rediscovery of my recently deceased mother’s collection of Russian literature.
Well today, by random coincidence, I stumbled across an old email reference to a 4.5 hour (!) interview with Robert Pirsig for a 1974 edition of CBS “Ideas” series, discussing his then recently best-selling “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (ZMM). (I also have local copy and full transcript of the interview.)
I know very little about the interviewers, but in the first half hour – talking about madness<>genius continuum – they bring-up reference to “very important writer” Colin Wilson’s (1956) “The Outsider” one of the “angry young men” who helped popularise Existentialism in 60’s Britain. And then engaged in linking-up his work with Arthur Koestler and Doris Lessing, including Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” and “The Lotus and the Robot”.
Checking my copy of Koestler’s “The Yogi and the Commissar” collection I find “The Lotus and the Robot” is NOT part of it, a separate publication, and yet that collection is (a) dedicated to Michael Polanyi and (b) prefaced by a Melville quote from “Moby Dick”. Also very influential to me, thanks to the George Steiner rave review of ZMM that accompanied its 1974 publication, positively comparing ZMM with Moby Dick.
And there’s still 4 hours to go. I gotta get off, and write!
‘God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draft – nay but the draft of a draft. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash and Patience.’ Melville in Moby Dick.
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