Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Turning Inward

3 Ramadhan 1429

A day so far characterised by a sore throat. Somewhat solipsistic, but the vulnerability engendered through weakness is always likely to take you to that kind of place. The important thing is to get away from there.

This morning I finished Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers, quite a good way of keeping in touch with the bigger world. It’s his best novel, I think. My hesitation comes from a realisation that some of the shorter ones – A Clockwork Orange, Abba Abba – hold together very successfully, gaining a certain intensity as a result of their brevity. But of the longer novels this is the only one I can think of that sustains itself and feels close to fully achieved. It helps that the central character evokes a degree of sympathetic understanding that Burgess usually withholds from his protagonists who are all too often mere cyphers. Perhaps it was the challenge of having to give a genuinely felt rendering of homosexual experience that led Burgess to the creation of a real character for once, despite the fictive games that are played around him.

My other means of keeping in touch with something bigger than my sore throat (apart from getting a couple of hours of work done) has been to embark on a reading of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. The difficulty here is to stop myself from descending into pointless rage as she unfolds some of the dreadful wickedness perpetrated in the name of free markets and the like over the last forty years or so. It helps that none of this is really terribly new, but I’m not sure I want to read another account of the misdeeds of the Pinochet regime in Chile now this one has left me so depressed. (And that’s just the first chapter or so.)

Come to think of it, Earthly Powers is also pretty bracing on the subject of human wickedness, and idiocy. Perhaps the cultivation of one’s own garden, and sore throat, is the way to go?

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