I completed my re-reading of Iain McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary last week finding, to my surprise, that the second half took more concentrated reading in general than the first. I undertook a second reading of the whole thing based on a feeling that I hadn't really done justice to the more scientific first half of the book in which the author outlines his thesis with regard to the functioning of the hemispheres of the brain based on a very wide range of data from a number of fields of expertise. In fact, this time I found it fairly easy to follow this material. I suspect this was because I was very familiar with the thesis, so all the details fell into place, whereas the first time round I was somewhat in the dark as to where all the details were leading such that some of the points made seemed rather opaque.
However, on my first reading I'd raced through McGilchrist's treatment of the key stages in western civilisation's oscillation between the influence of the hemispheres, partly as a result of the excitement of seeing just how illuminating the thesis was. This time around I found myself lingering over quite a number of the insights, trying to digest their implications as thoroughly as possible. A couple of paragraphs on the nature of Beauty late in the text, for example, found me reflecting upon why it is that as I've grown older my sense of the beautiful in visual art, music, poetry and dance has grown so much more definite.
When I was listening to Ligeti's The Devil's Staircase the other day I was doing so with McGilchrist's comments on modernism in music very much in mind. The strange thing was, though, that I'm not sure McGilchrist would be all that sympathetic to the composer and his work, yet all I can hear in the piece is validation of all he says about the nature of music and the insights into the nature of things it offers.
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