Lots Of Ideas

Reading Iain McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World is proving to be an extraordinarily thought-provoking experience for this reader. On almost every page there's some fascinating nugget of information - who knew that carp discriminate between the blues and classical music? - but it's the slightly uncanny fact that the broad outlines of the central thesis expounded within its pages are helping me understand almost every random thought I've had for the last few years about art, music, creativity, human nature, paradox - in fact, pretty much the whole caboodle - that's exhilaratingly unnerving. I keep thinking, this explains everything, though, of course, it doesn't. But it does make me feel as if it's possible to get some genuine coherence into what might previously have been characterised as a hodgepodge of intuitions and half-articulated suspicions.

And I'm less than a third of the way in!