By way of Intuitive Linked Communication (ILC), this discussion with Carl Jung earlier this week. Sometimes you play with an idea for some time, thinking you understand it, and suddenly realize (with a little help from your friends) that it’s bigger and more important than you had thought it.
Hemingway on his postwar books
Friday, July 22, 2011
Papa, why did you conceive of the land, sea, air book? The scope was way too big to be accomplished. As you recognize, you didn’t have time enough to learn air warfare let alone air realities in the first place. But was Across The River the land book, and Islands the part of the sea book?
You’re confusing yourself a bit. Yes, Across The River was my land war book, and maybe I could have done better to leave out the love story — though I don’t see how I could have, and to have Cantwell fall in a less impossible love wouldn’t have fit in either. But the indirect description of the aftereffects of battle and warfare was as well done as I could. If it was a bridge too far for my critics, I can’t help that. In time the book will rise or sink, and it won’t have much to do with the judgment of the critics of 1950.
Another birthday
Yesterday, anticipating this birthday, I was writing about where I had come to in my life, realizing that a lot of my worries had been a waste of time, and it naturally flowed into a brief but meaningful exchange with my friends upstairs about our place in the universe, which I thought I’d better share with you.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
So tomorrow is my birthday.
I can see that I am loved by many I have scarcely thought of. My habit of considering only what I can see you’re here, and not imagining what takes place around me, has distorted my perceptions all these years.
Deepak Chopra: Consciousness is all
This, via the Monroe Institute’s website, is Deepak Chopra explaining in four minutes the scientific reasons to believe that the primary basis of existence is neither matter nor energy (whatever “energy” might be, divorced from its context of matter!) but consciousness. I am no physicist, but this feels right. I suppose that, in context, “feels right” means “restates what I already believe.” Well, so be it. Four minutes, no more:
http://www.monroeinstitute.org/thehub/quantum-physics-and-consciousness/
Hemingway on the problem of biography
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
7 AM. Reading Hotchner’s Hemingway And His World, now. A reason that people can’t get his life straight is that there are too many parts to remember. So, if there’s a long stretch when he isn’t publishing (regardless if he is writing) it looks like a blank patch. Or if he isn’t even writing, clearly lost time. Yes, Papa?
It’s natural enough. You want to tell somebody life story, you find a couple themes and follow them — his work, his loves, his families (the one he is born into, and the one he creates). You might throw in his hobbies or other things, but it’s only a few themes. They won’t all be very communicable. They won’t be equally important, and they won’t be equally important at any given time in his life. And they won’t be the whole of his life, and they can’t ever be.
This whole idea of understanding somebody’s life is oversimplified. You can find a mainspring sometimes, and tell the story of the mainspring and how it plays out, but even there you’re going to get — let’s say, you’re going to get one external facet of the man — one place where what he is interacts with what he experiences of the world. And since you can’t get the internal connection between that part of him and other parts, you’re going to get a very superficial, almost static, view of even that one part of him. It would be all right if you just could remember that you’re mostly missing him.
Well, I am certainly beginning to see it with you. A few others make it clear too. Jefferson, for instance. A lot of facets to examine, and no practical way to hold them all in mind, and no practical way to express them all within a sufficiently small compass that the reader can hold it.
Movies or TV could do it, to some extent, but the basic fact is that it takes more than a lifetime to understand and absorb a lifetime, so what are you going to do?
Gordon Phinn on reincarnation
My friend Gordon Phinn writes an interesting blog, http://anotherwordofgord.wordpress.com/ and in today’s entry he touches on the issue of reincarnation. If you’ve read either The Sphere and the Hologram or The Cosmic Internet, you’ll know that my views on reincarnation, as shaped by what the guys have been telling me, don’t match the common view. But Gordon has a lot of experience, and you’ll find his views worth considering.
Cosmic Internet feedback
You know those old recruiting posters, “Uncle Sam Needs YOU!”? Well, at the moment I need you more than he does.
Customer reviews on Amazon are important in helping people to decide if they want to take a chance on a book. So far, The Cosmic Internet has had only two reviews, and one of them in entirely negative. Not the way to sell books!
Please, if you liked the book, go to The Cosmic Internet page on Amazon and say that you liked it, and why. It’ll help.
Thanks.