Scintillating scotoma

In one sense it’s a little crazy to challenge and defy Plato, the Old Testament prophets, Jesus, scientists, one’s own doctor, and especially friends. Who am I to do this? A nobody. But you see, that’s a great strength. If you are a somebody, you have something to defend. At the bottom of the heap, you are free. You have only yourself to keep alive—or not.

The real strength comes when you are in touch with the ground on which you stand, literally and metaphorically. I’m on home ground in my own self. I do admire the wonderful edifice built by scientists. This morning Melvyn Bragg’s radio programme, “In Our Time” was a discussion of macromolecules “that form the basis of all life”. We know them as polymers. They are the basis of spiders’ webs and most of our plastic packaging. We use a lot of oil and fuel-energy to make plastic bags, but a spider eats flies and other garbage to produce gossamer stronger than steel, using only water-based chemical processes. Not only that, spiders’ webs are biodegradable, unlike our own legacy of plastics in landfill sites, which may litter the planet (including the oceans) almost forever.

That science is a deadly litterer is not science’s fault, you may say. Blame business, blame governments. It is they who sponsor science, which is morally neutral. Like a prostitute: the acts she offers to perform are to please her clients, not her own choice. When I make the comparison I am morally neutral too. I don’t condemn prostitutes, nor their clients either. Nor do I attempt by rhetoric to stir the emotions of my regular readers. They are too sophisticated to fall for that.

I wrote a post on this blog about litter on 30th June 2007. I remember the occasion very well. This blog is a kind of journal for me, recording moments trivial in themselves but accompanied by a flash of illumination which were palely echoed in my words at the time. I have a photographic memory of a spot up against a hedgerow in a recreation ground in Bracknell, Berkshire, which I used to call Babylon Town. I used to refer to the company I worked for as Maxiram: in fact it was the Fujitsu Corporation. Every lunchtime I’d follow impulse and go walking in the surrounding area. On that day, I saw some plastic bottles left like the borders of a square to record the visit of a group who must have sat or lain in the shade of that hedgerow and enjoyed themselves. I record on that post my feelings at the time: “I didn’t blame them for the non-biodegradable quality of the bottles.” From the programme “In Our Time” I learn that science could, if it had sufficient incentive, develop polymers with the qualities of spider-silk, which careless youth could litter carelessly, with all the innocence of Adam and Eve before the Fall. We are not there yet.

In this blog, long ago labelled “perpetual-lab” and originally titled “An Ongoing Experiment”, you can observe, as I do, that I don’t follow reason so much as blind impulse. That is my own intuitive substitute for the normal conventions of scientific method. It’s fallible, prone to the grossest error, but tell me what isn’t! My real strength is to allow something other than my conscious mind to come through. Any wisdom expressed here is our common wisdom, the wisdom of this organism called Earth, which is part of a bigger organism called the Universe, which started, so the scientists’ creation myth tells us, with a Big Bang. I like to listen to the other creation myths too, such as those of the shamans scattered over various parts of the globe. They say there was once a common language, common to all species—birds, beasts, plants, rocks and us. We are cut from the same cloth. Our sense of separateness is balanced, if only our culture and our individual life-journey would allow us to see it, by a sense of oneness: which is more than a “sense”. We are bound together in our destiny. Homo sapiens is currently dominant. This is very scary indeed: for us and all the other species, animal, vegetable and even mineral (for we plunder minerals too).

Without wisdom, every single thing we do, utter or even think is dangerous. Let us take science, and out of science let us extract “medical science”. Here I have to be mindful of John Muir’s dictum that “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Everything interacts. But that is not my experience when I go to see my doctor. When I have symptoms, they are a signal for me to go to the wise man, who in my culture is the “general practitioner” (GP) within the United Kingdom’s free National Health Service. He sees clusters of symptoms but hardly the bigger picture. I don’t like to talk about this kind of thing. It tends to result in well-wishers wishing me well, which is nice, but distracts from the point I am trying to make. So let me cloak it in fiction, and say that I go to the doctor because I sometimes suffer from a temporary condition such as scintillating scotoma (see accompanying illustrations from an artist-sufferer’s impressions), together with certain other symptoms. As it happens, he ignores the scotoma. He seems to care about the other symptoms more. He gives me a thorough physical examination, one of which is so intimate, I’ll leave you to guess what. At least he asked permission first. It’s a man thing. Men of my age are prone to a certain part going wrong. He also sends me for a blood test. My blood reveals as much about my health as my untamed intuitions reveal about this organism called me which, in my view, is connected almost seamlessly to you and everything else on Earth. Everything is hitched to everything else in the Universe, but medical science hasn’t got there yet. My GP certainly hasn’t. He looks at the parts, certainly not the whole.

The amusing thing I notice about my symptoms is this. Once I’ve reported them to my GP, they disappear! This is an instance of what they call “the placebo effect”. If you look up the web, they describe it as “the power of positive thinking” and suggest it can be activated by a sugar-pill. I have no reason to argue with that. I can’t have any reason to argue with the medical profession’s definition of a medical term. But I am in need of some term to explain a phenomenon I have oft observed. When I have a pain, physical or metaphorical, it’s a spur to action. I must fix it and if all else fails I must go to the shaman, which in my culture as I’ve said is the GP, the psychotherapist, the plumber, the police, etc. I pick the wisest I can find and leave it in their hands. Lo and behold, the pain disappears. As ever, the exception proves (i.e. tests) the rule. I did need a plumber recently but he was a rogue, a “cowboy” as we say. My logical conscious mind made allowances (with considerable effort) for his behaviour. But my super-intelligent body kept me awake during the night. My conscious mind cursed my weakness: “Be a man! You did the right thing. Don’t be intimidated.” Insomnia is like a symptom. It makes you act the next morning. Once you’ve made the right decision, the symptom (in this case nagging worry) goes away. The proper decision was to contact a proper plumber. The moment I’d done that, I stopped worrying about the water leak. That, as we say, was “a piece of cake” to fix. There is something inside us that knows, that makes proper judgements. Logic, conscious mind, reason: faculties which can be easily fooled. Gut feeling is better. Even though it can be fooled too.

So this is the nature of the placebo effect. The body sends symptoms to warn us, and removes them when it receives messages that we’ve done what we can. The body is super-intelligent but alas this is very different from infallible. There is no perfection. (So doctor, don’t be a cynic who hands out sugar-pills. That’s a betrayal of your patient’s trust, even a hypochondriac one.) One might say that yes there is a God (where God is an algebraic expression x standing in for all that is more beneficent, knowing and powerful than us, which acts on our behalf when we let go the reins of our own imperious mind enough to let it). Nevertheless, x may not be perfect. Or rather, we cannot possibly know if x is imperfect or not. You and I are parts of a bigger whole. How can we judge? How can we possibly dare to let our conscious minds dictate the future of this organism Earth (or possibly Universe) of which we are integral parts?

In my first sentence I mentioned amongst other things “defiance of one’s own doctor”. I don’t blame the dear man. He’s a highly efficient chessman (above a pawn in rank) of a huge organism designed to channel the UK taxpayer’s money into pursuing Health. It’s not his job to actually define health. That is done at a higher level, in conjunction with those necessary accountants they call “bean-counters” so that the voter can know if he and she are getting value for money. The bean-counters demand metrics, of which the most eloquent is longevity. Yes, all very well. Conditionally and for the time being I shall collude with my doctor’s efforts to stave off my demise. But Health is far more than longevity. Health encompasses happiness, living harmoniously, creatively, with love for all, free of crime and ill-will. Longevity in itself is a worthless coin.

One Minute, Please

Every day I desire to publish some nice little piece here, but unless it’s dictated by the inner voice, over which I have no control, it’s not worth the effort. This voice is silent sometimes for weeks on end—or more likely I haven’t learnt how to listen—and then it may utter a single phrase, as it did on Sunday: “Time is short, so don’t rush.” I made a note of it, marvelling at the paradox. Very fine, something to practise. I wanted to expand it into a short essay, but the inner voice remained tight-lipped. Then literature, that undying treasure, came to my rescue, with a perfect example, this from Benchley—Or Else! (1947, a compilation of his newspaper columns from the Thirties) :

One Minute, Please
About an hour ago the telephone bell rang. I answered it after a fashion.

A very brisk young woman said, “Wait a minute, please,” but she didn’t mean the “please”. What she obviously meant was just “Wait a minute!”

Now this is a thing that explicitly irks me. When I am called by a secretary who doesn’t tell me who is calling, but says “Wait a minute” and then goes off somewhere for five minutes, I hang up.

So I hung up. “They’ll call back,” I said to myself, and stood waiting by the instrument.

I tried to read the paper I had in my hand, but couldn’t concentrate. Each second, I could hear that bell ringing, only it didn’t ring. I sat down by the telephone. “There’s no sense in going back to the room,” I thought. “It’ll come any minute now.” But it didn’t.

* * * * * *

The sound of a telephone bell which ought to ring any minute, but doesn’t, is much worse than the actual thing. By this time I was definitely on edge. I was also in a frenzy to know who the caller had been.

Finally, I went into the other room. “That’ll bring them,” I said to myself, sagely. I know how those things work.

But I overestimated their perversity this time. Even when I sat down in a low easy chair, difficult to get out of, it didn’t work. As a final ruse, I lay down on a couch and pretended to be asleep. No bell.

I thought of calling Central and asking who had called me, but that would be weak. Anyway, Central couldn’t tell me. I thought of calling all my friends and asking them if they had just called, but that would be pretty futile on the face of it. I thought of putting the whole matter out of my mind, but that was impossible. I was obsessed.

* * * * * *

It has been an hour now and I have been pacing up and down the room gnawing at my nails. Obviously whoever it was is not going to call back. In a weak attempt to restore my peace of mind I am using this space as a

PERSONAL COLUMN

At five-thirty on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 25, who called me on the telephone?

Perhaps eighty years have passed since Robert Benchley wrote that. Apart from the shape of the telephone, has very much changed? His article is exactly the kind of thing I would have wished to write, and meant it too. Would we all have acted like this? Would you?

Time is short, so let me not rush. (Whoops? Is that the time ...?)

In memory of George Whitman, 1913-2011

I once spent a few weeks as George Whitman’s guest in his bookshop opposite Notre Dame in Paris. Today I heard of his death on the news. I’ve mentioned him three times on this blog: in May 2008, May 2009 and Feb 2011. It has always been difficult to write about the man himself, for I never understood him. Watching the excellent documentary embedded below, I get it at last. The man I encountered, who never seemed to reveal himself, was precisely the man everyone else saw, the man you can see for yourself as he was in 2003. The only difference was that I met him in May 1962, when he was 49, looking more or less like the picture alongside. His shop wasn’t called Shakespeare & Co then. The sign above simply said Librairie Mistral. He slept in the front room on the first floor, usually with his current girlfriend. (She had a tiny flat of her own, on the nearby Île de la Cité. She hired me to paint its walls.) Like everywhere else in the building, George’s bedroom was lined with books and became part of the shop as soon as we opened in the morning. The narrow passage to reach it doubled as the kitchen, whose hygiene standard was no better than as shown in the movie. On the same passage was the toilet, (a hole-in-the floor squat kind) which also doubled as the shower; both functions lightly curtained off. My own assigned task, in return for the free bed provided to writers-in-residence, was to clean up after his Alsatian dog. It would be left in the shop overnight to languish on the tiled ground floor, using that time and space to do what a dog normally does only when taken for a walk. I had to make the place clean and sweet with mop and bucket before the shop opened, regretting that any books stacked in corners on the floor ran the risk of getting a little soggy and stained.



Who was George? A remote man who trustingly invited strangers to live with him, a generous miser, a kindly bully, morosely gregarious, indulgently intolerant; a clown who lived his entire life in public: what you saw was apparently the whole man. He and the bookshop were one. The bookshop was his entire world, But it was also the wider world as it could conceivably become. George was the embodiment of Ubuntu. (I've fallen in love with this concept having, for technical reasons, abandoned Windows on my old computer and tentatively embraced Ubuntu—the operating system—, which operates on Whitmanesque principles too. Even down to the mopping-up, but that’s probably because I haven’t got it house-trained yet.)

I only realised this morning that George Whitman must have been the inspiration for Dylan Moran’s hero Bernard Black in the comedy series Black Books. There are lots of clips on YouTube but living in the UK I’m barred from viewing them (Channel 4 copyright). So I’ve made a short video myself, playing back the DVD at home. Bernard is nothing like George, but the homage is there, nonetheless.

What is the greatest invention of all time?

Click the link above for source (BBC Radio 4 "Today", 12/12/11 @ 8:20) See also this link for more details. In the dialogue below, Sarah is Sarah Montague, interviewing on behalf of the BBC; John is John Humphrys, senior programme presenter (pictured above).

SARAH: What is the greatest invention of all time? Ask that question 20 years ago and you might have a different answer than you would today. Ask it 100 years ago, or 200 years ago, and you most certainly would.

Samantha Weinberg considers the options in an article for the magazine Intelligent life. But she only considers tangible inventions, not ideas. She joins us here in the studio, as does Graham Farmelo, who’s a senior fellow at the Science Museum. Good morning to you both.

Samantha Weinberg, do you think you can only play this game on what’s the greatest invention if you do exclude ideas and only concentrate on things?

SAMANTHA: I think every game has rules, and those are the rules that I set. I think in many cases, actual tangible inventions have been the forces that propelled us into a different state and moved us forward. But mostly—often they do come with ideas. I’m not excluding ideas … I’ve excluded them in the article because it was fun and this was the game we were playing. I’m not saying ideas aren’t important. I’m just saying they’re ideas. I was talking about invention.

SARAH: Graham Farmelo, you’d like to include the ideas …?

GRAHAM: Oh yes! I think ideas are fundamentally more important than things. If you look at the really big ideas—democracy, social justice—these are huge, huge things that shape society. Ultimately things are the fripperies of civilisation, rather than the driving force.

SAMANTHA: I know but they’re ideas. I’m talking about inventions. There is a difference, maybe it’s semantics, but …

GRAHAM: OK, yeah, yeah …

SARAH: It’s more than semantics, though. It just makes the game very complicated if you’re including ideas as well as things.

GRAHAM: Yes, well you know, somebody had to invent the idea of democracy. Somebody had to invent the idea of doing science, or doing mathematics. I’m saying that those things are fundamentally important. They don’t just arise naturally, these things. They are human constructs and they’re terribly important.

SARAH: OK, though I suppose you could say that somebody invented the idea of Father Christmas, which is an interesting idea you use in your article, Samantha Weinberg, and children I guess would probably vote for that, as their best invention.

GRAHAM: Well, this time in the morning I’d probably vote for the espresso machine. (laughter)

SAMANTHA: To get here, we had to come in a car and that had wheels. We wouldn’t have been here. We wouldn’t be drinking our coffee …

JOHN: … stuck in a traffic jam, with our wheels!

SARAH: So if we play the game now, first of all without ideas, what is the greatest invention of all time?

SAMANTHA: Well, I’ve argued in the piece for the World Wide Web. I’m talking about sitting here now, the thing which has the most power, that has the greatest—it’s transformed our life in every single sense. It’s the Web, and that’s only been around for 22 years. I’m arguing for the power of the Web—in medicine, in writing, in human communication and friendship …

SARAH: … in democracy!

SAMANTHA: In democracy, exactly, it’s fanned the flames of democracy in so many countries …

JOHN: Graham Farmelo?

GRAHAM: Good choice, but I’d go for the printing press. I mean, in terms of what went before, and what went afterwards, that was absolutely transformative. I think it’s too soon to say, by the way …

SARAH: Which needed paper …

GRAHAM: I think paper’s a good choice too. The idea of printing ideas, and distributing them …

SARAH: OK. In a sense it’s similar to the idea of the Web, obviously a bit more restricted. OK can we—Round 2 of the game, include ideas, what are the answers?

SAMANTHA: Still the Web.

GRAHAM: I will go for democracy.

SAMANTHA: Well, I’m not sure it always works.

GRAHAM: I beg your pardon?

SARAH (louder): She’s not sure it always works!

GRAHAM: That’s certainly a good question to ask in this studio, I agree …

SARAH: What about mathematics?

GRAHAM: I would say in terms of the way our society’s driven today it’s important to argue that mathematics, right back to our number system—you couldn’t do any of it. You couldn’t drive your car, you wouldn’t have the Internet if you didn’t have a mathematical organisation underpinning it. So all right, you’ve persuaded me, Sarah.

I didn’t need to think to participate in this game. An answer popped into my head straight away from an unknown source. I tend to trust such answers more than those arrived at via conscious reason, for those are easily corrupted. But before I tell you my own answer, please join the game and think of your own answer. The BBC site offers links to Facebook and Twitter for listeners’ input. So please think now for yourself before you read on. I think the greatest invention, the biggest idea in the history of our species, is God. That’s something the BBC would never allow on its airwaves. God belongs in its designated God-slots, which I’m sure its founding charter insists upon and which occur mainly on Sunday, apart from little pockets of religion, such as The Daily Service, 09:45 Radio 4 long wave, and Choral Evensong, Radio 3 Wednesday afternoons at 15:30. The rest of the time its loyalties lie with Science, Progress and Liberal Materialism.

One virtue of my nomination is its capacity to invite offence or ridicule from everyone. Progressives want to ignore the fact that God was ever invented. Believers deny that God was ‘invented’. They insist that God invented me.

Then I thought “God, or gods? which do I mean?” But that was a more rational thought, less valuable than the intuition. Of course I meant God! I was brought up in a culture of God-belief, even though I never quite shared it. Atheism itself is witness to this God-belief. Take that away and it has nothing to say.*

So now, the intuition having spoken in all its starkness and purity from my unconscious yet culture-shaped mind, how do I justify it rationally? How do I explain its ‘why’? The answer is quite interesting, and relevant to us all. Emerging as a new species, homo sapiens finds itself vulnerable in the universe, blessed and burdened equally with the gift of consciousness and fear of death. It looks at the sky and perhaps has a sense of immensity. It looks at everything and finds itself able to ask the question ‘why’? Despite the enormity of the struggle for survival, it finds itself unable to be satisfied with merely surviving. It looks within as well as without, finds an intricate world there, full of impulses, imaginings, reactions.

It has language for the outward things, words forged to express the things needed to live together in family, hunting-team and tribe. When it tries to express the inward things, it discovers poetry, and yearnings, and the makings of myths. When uttered, these myths become powerful: not just as yarns, like the tale of “how we slew the Mammoth”, or “how our ancestor discovered this land, and defeated the tribe that laid claim to it before”, but “how All This came about”. And most particularly, there are the wise sayings of seers, in whose eyes shines the light of some joy not known to all, which they try to talk about in parables.

*Later, I reflected that not all regions of the world may have a culture based on one God. But that merely reflects the subjectivity and cultural relativity of this game. Samantha Weinberg who invented it thinks that the greatest invention was launched 22 years ago. Graham in the discussion above was trying to say that it was too early to say whether the Web is the greatest invention ever. Perhaps with God, we might want to say it’s too late, that the once-great idea has outlived its usefulness. But here we are in this generation, still hugely affected by an Idea which has not yet been satisfactorily supplanted.

My nomination does not imply any belief on my own part, but it does imply my rejection of most atheist propaganda. For example, it’s true that the Spanish Inquisition was directly inspired by the Roman Catholic interpretation of how men should behave before God. But the Spanish Inquisition is not implicit in the idea of God. The idea has been bent in every direction, used for every purpose, embraced by every kind of person. But it is still a great and necessary one, to get us here.

John Gray’s Straw Dogs

In his book John Gray is a demolisher, razing to the ground almost every idea which offers hope, whether it comes from science, religion, humanism or any other -ism. It’s not a long book. You can get through it in a couple of days: easily but not comfortably, unless you’ve already sacrificed all the sacred cows he might possibly want to slaughter on your behalf.

As you work your way through, you try to imagine the purpose of his bulldozing. As demolition contractor, he exposes the dysfunction of the brownfield site on which we have established our dwelling; gathers our garbage of indefensible ideas for disposal, grubs up the old foundations, detoxifies the soil down to the rocky substrate. Once he’s disposed of our cherished values and ideals, what will he want to build on these fresh fields, this tabula rasa? Will he simply leave it empty for a “Nature Reserve”? Not for long. Nature includes human nature, which doesn’t stop short of polluting and destroying on a massive scale. Ultimately, it’s the rest of Nature which will work out what to do with us, to protect itself. We are animals. We cannot change what we are. We cannot set the world to rights. The world sets us to rights.

His purpose, like many a reformer before him, many a philosopher, is to cleanse us from those unquestioned ideas which colour our perception of reality, but to which we cling, to ward off despair. Says Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

John Gray has done more in his book to cleanse those doors of perception than mescaline* could achieve. He does it through the brute force of rhetoric, a weapon he applies crudely, but never offensively. He’s never ad hominem. He doesn’t accuse us of being evil or stupid. We just can’t help it! The heretic Church of England priest Don Cupitt praises Straw Dogs thus:

Tough-minded and entertaining, this is popular philosophy at its best. The more you disagree with John Gray’s main line of argument, the more you will gain from him. Splendid!

Which is like saying that the more unfit you are, the more you will gain from the obstacle course forced on the military recruit. Let me now summarise the obstacles that he wishes us to surmount.

The idea of human progress is wishful thinking and unsubstantiated. There is progress in technology and science, but it’s a mixed blessing, because directed and exploited by a violent species homo sapiens, whom he sometimes calls “homo rapiens”, and whose nature has not changed, nor can change by its own efforts. Our nature is the product of evolution, not ours to change by act of will. In this, he’s a determinist. In short we are just another species, fruit of Evolution’s cornucopia of invention, no better than dogs, despite being Top Dog in our power to make every species extinct including our own, and to inflict serious damage on the planet short of making it barren for ever. He happily uses the epithet Gaia, referring to the self-correcting and regenerating power of Earth, as described by James Lovelock; a power which will happily destroy humanity before humanity has the chance to destroy all life. Earth is safe, but not Man. Hence the title of his book, as explained below:

Straw dogs were used as ceremonial objects in ancient China. Chapter 5 of the Tao Te Ching begins with the lines “Heaven and Earth are heartless / treating creatures like straw dogs”. Su Ch’e comments “Heaven and Earth are not partial. They do not kill living things out of cruelty or give them birth out of kindness. We do the same when we make straw dogs to use in sacrifices. We dress them up and put them on the altar, but not because we love them. And when the ceremony is over, we throw them into the street, but not because we hate them.” (From Wikipedia, quoting as source Red Pine’s 1996 book Lao-tzu's Taoteching.)

Any hope we may have of improving human nature, of reaching what Teilhard de Chardin calls the Omega Point, or some other distant imagined Utopia where there is peace—where everyone feels all the time what you or I feel on a good day (which we think of as Heaven)—Gray seems to dash that hope. Actually, of course, he cannot, for

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To Be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come. (Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man)

We may say that Gray has scotch’d the Snake, not kill’d it, the Snake being false hope. Or he has shown us how to prune it for ourselves, to cut through the thicket of cultural expectations. When he’s finished lashing out at everything that moves, we see what a half-hearted job the atheists have done. Their only aim in razing the brownfield temples of religion is to build their new temple—of humanist progress, based on a design already copyrighted by the Christians. They are mere freebooters. Without the idea of God, which they plundered from Christianity in order to deride it, they would have nothing to say. They don’t do a proper demolition at all. For they still embrace the ideas of Progress, Heaven on Earth, Man’s superiority to the other animals. Darwin said we are just like all life, all plants and animals: patterned by DNA, shaped by force of environment, nothing more. Yet the atheist freebooters still believe Genesis 1:28, probably more fervently than the Christians:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Their God is no longer the Hebrew God, but the God of the unholy trinity of Capitalism, Science and Technology, whose dominion has in fact proved a curse more toxic than the religion whence they sprang. Indeed, hints Gray, there’s a lineage linking the Old Testament, Plato, Christianity, capitalism, technology, science and atheism.

As I sped through my first reading of Gray’s book, I kept wondering what he would say in his last chapter. Surely you don’t clear so much land, with so much expenditure of precious effort, raising so much controversy as you go, without a plan for its subsequent development? I could not believe he was inspired by sheer nihilism. So let him speak for himself, in these extracts from the short final chapter, “As it is”:

In his novel Nostromo, Joseph Conrad wrote: ‘Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.’
...
In thinking so highly of work, we are aberrant. Few other cultures have ever done so. For nearly all of history and all prehistory, work was an indignity. (Cf my last post and Susan’s comment in particular.)
...
Searching for a meaning in life may be a useful therapy, but it has nothing to do with the life of the spirit. Spiritual life is not a search for meaning but a release from it.
...
Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as simply to see?

------------------------
* I refer to Aldous Huxley’s account of his mescaline-taking in his 1954 book, The Doors of Perception.