Gaia is the word for "unity-of-life-processes". The experiment here is to unify the various threads of voice and sense of self together into an undivided unity. Spirituality, economics, politics, science and ordinary life interleaved.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

French versus English literature

Dancing to dance music while cooking and reading I suddenly realized what the inherent superiority of the literature of the Anglosphere is to the other world literatures. For the sake of over-precision, I mean English language texts.

I remembered Andre Gide’s comment that the problem with English literature is that they don’t understand what to omit from the text. Exactly, Andre!

The problem with French literature is that they don’t understand what to NOT be serious about. They might have exquisite taste, even exquisite wit, but it all to no avail in certain modes of representation if they still don’t know when to just not be witty and tasteful. Vulgarity has it’s own precise delights, which I can locate only in the English language text.

Perhaps it is a certain athiestic irreverence one could locate in Bernard Shaw, or maybe it's in the camp of Mr Wilde that this quality has its source, but I suspect it is simply that the English speakers grew tired of the meagre inheritance of Greek tragedy and reverted to the same demiurge that informed the lost Greek satyr-plays: the archetypal urge to be Silly For Its Own Sake.

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