2003-01-11 - 11:43 p.m.

Not Exactly Timeless

Today I ran a chess tournament in Albany. It went off without a hitch, which was nice. The only problem was that I spent about an hour last night getting some documents ready for the event, and then promptly left them at home when I left the house this morning. These mental lapses are very annoying, but thankfully I was able to make do without those papers.

Since I was running the tournament and not playing in it, I had plenty of time to read that book I was talking about last entry: "The Philosopher's Stone" by Colin Wilson.

In the forward, Wilson says that he doesn't write to excite people's emotions, but rather their minds. Therefore the novel reads more like a thought experiment, and the plot is kind of thin. Still, it sounded interesting.

The basic premise of the book: a scientist named Lester stumbles on a way to make man use 90% of his forebrain instead of the 10% we use now. He uses the technique on himself and gains fantastic mental powers, as well as the ability to see into the past and "read" objects by focusing on them. Wilson draws on the research he did in his non-fiction writings on the occult to try to theorize what a man that can completely use his brain would be like. He makes some interesting philosophical points. It's also one of his postulates that such a man would become virtually immortal.

However, around 2/3 of the way through the book, I ran across a passage that sort of jolted me out of my reading. One of the subplots involves Lester trying to determine if Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. The answer to this question is yes, but Wilson says it doesn't really matter. He doesn't much care for either Bacon or Shakespeare, calling them "second-rate minds." He explains why:

As a scientist, I had got used to thinking clearly and logically about important issues, ignoring the trivial, steering clear of negative emotions. In reading about Shakespeare and Bacon, it had struck me that their "life world" is made up almost entirely of the trivial and the negative. Judged by any modern standard, they are both as outdated as the phlogiston theory of combustion, or the Edison phonograph. Reading their works, I found myself in a petty stifling atmosphere such as I once noticed at a party when two homosexuals began quarrelling. It as impossible to get involved in the action of "Macbeth" or "Antony and Cleopatra" because I felt from the beginning that these people are fools, and that consequently nothing that happens to them can possibly matter. In spite of the magnificent literary flashes, I had no more desire to remain in the company of Shakespeare's characters than in the company of the two queers at the party. They simply didn't matter, any more than the quarrels of children matter.

I don't know about you, but what stood out for me in that paragraph was his pointless belittlement of the "two homosexuals," and the casual use of the derogatory epithet "queers." Supposedly the speaker here is a superior man with his eyes on eternal truths, but he certainly doesn't sound that way. In fact, it makes him sound as "trivial and negative" as the people he's talking about.

Adding to the irony is that this casual bit of nastiness reveals the pettiness of the character, and probably the author's thinking on the subject as well. It also clearly places the novel in time: it was originally published in 1969, before the gay rights movement really began. I can't imagine a modern author making a blunder like that. So the character, by this bit of inadvertent meanness, is revealed to be not aloof, not superior, and very much a product of his time.

Strangely, after this gaffe the novel just starts to sag, like a balloon with a leak. It turns into some sort of absurd science-fiction horror story where the characters are menaced by the "Ancient Old Gods" who are sleeping in the earth and are trying to keep the secret of mankind's origins from the scientists' time-seeing abilities. This "old gods" stuff is directly ripped off from pulp horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, and the fact that Wilson mentions this in the forward doesn't make it any better.

So, the thought experiment goes awry, and some monster-movie stuff is tacked onto the end of it to make it more of a story. Kind of disappointing. I waited 13 years to read this book, too. Makes me wonder what other treasures I have lurking in my library.