I look like a fool in this picture, but I am a fool, after all… not much that can be done about that.
The act of rice planting, in my mind, is magic. You put this stuff in the ground, and six months later it’s food. How does it happen? Miracles, man. Tide comes in, tide goes out. Aliens. Sure, you can explain why it happens while you sit here at your computer and Google up the details, but if you get out there and do it yourself, maybe you’ll realize that you yourself are a wizard.
Getting off the computer. I am in favor of it.
I am making a list of things that René Guénon is wrong about. Here is a start:
The role of Tradition in East Asia. Related, Guénon falsely thought that Tradition itself was linked intimately with esoteric knowledge, rather than simply making esoteric knowledge possible and purposeful. Evola corrected some of this, which I will elaborate on in my next post.
Reincarnation. Guénon believed that no tradition ever espoused reincarnation and that the clear material evidence in its favor was merely “psychic residue“. This is silly nonsense. He invented the term “psychic residue” himself so he hasn’t a foot to stand on calling other traditions false. Evola bizarrely found a basis for this in Buddhism, which Guénon had rejected entirely as false tradition.
I leave you with an adorable Chesterton quote:
The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called,”Keep to-morrow dark,” and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) “Cheat the Prophet.” The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clevermen have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.
I regard the lack of fun, delight, and love in Guénon and Evola as a deep mistake by both these writers. The Traditionalists are convinced that as occult warriors they must be opposed on principle to the frivolous entertainments of the masses. Their failure is rather incredible, because fun is an exclusive property of the traditional elements of a society.
This may seem incorrect at first glance, because of an inversion that has occurred. Intellectuals now have a solid body of “serious” literature which mocks real tradition, and a constant stream of humor “with a message” employed by the left to mock the right. This seriousness, and this message, is not an integral part of fun, but is injected into it by modern progressivism. The enjoyment is actually drained out of these works by their poisonous politicization. A truly fulfilling sense of humor and fun requires a human concept to play with, so denouncing this concept renders your art less funny and more harsh, even misanthropic. One must only visit a playground to realize that fun is not a destructive force but actually requires rules and can only be fulfilling when those rules are obeyed. Quoting Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: “Play creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection.” Violating the rules renders a game meaningless.
Huizinga also has an interesting thing to say about poetry, which Spengler noted withers on the vine with the rise of modernity. Poetry cannot be put to work for progressivism, because
If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child’s soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man’s wisdom for the child’s.
The ancient Hindu epics are an incredible proof of this. They are a kind of play, in regular verse often performed with music or actors, that not only sustains tradition but created the tradition itself. Their primitive dreaminess and perennial magic are inseparable from their fun, the fact that they are a joy to listen to and watch. In short, they are a wonder of the world, an impenetrable mystery in a way that a poem celebrating scientific knowledge could never be.
In Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill, a king appears who institutes a host of absurd traditions throughout England, requiring every town to appoint a Provost who will wear ridiculous clothes at all times, carry a coat of arms, and be accompanied everywhere he goes by a team of halberd bearers. Nearly all of England is in revolt over this. They think these invented traditions demean their role as serious, modern, secular leaders. But one man, trying to get the king to protect his beloved neighborhood of Notting Hill, engages himself in the game fully, and presents himself to the king with complete pomp and circumstance. The other provosts grumble, but the delighted king addresses them:
You thought to spoil my joke, and bully me out of it, by becoming more and more modern, more and more practical, more and more bustling and rational. Oh, what a feast it was to answer you by becoming more and more august, more and more gracious, more and more ancient and mellow! But this lad has seen how to bowl me out. He has answered me back, vaunt for vaunt, rhetoric for rhetoric. He has lifted the only shield I cannot break, the shield of an impenetrable pomposity.
Fun in the traditional world is an activity that respects the existence of an institution. When there is a butt of a joke in a traditional society, it is the human being, unable to live up to the metaphysical tasks he is asked to fulfill. Human nature, which in tradition is not appealed to with capitalist treats but kept in check by a rigorous order, is a source of comedy that never stops supplying, and can always be much more subtly and pleasingly humorous than leftist, political humor. The object of the traditional joke is not, generally speaking, the shared standards of living. Cultural institutions can be funny either for the people participating in them or the people who despise them, but the latter group are playing a dangerous game. When ridicule of a standard becomes more prominent in society than the standard itself, soon the standard shall be unable to tolerate mockery. Then the standard will fall, and all the humor it gave the world will obviously cease with it; and the world will therefore lose some of its cheeriness and joy.
Christopher Hitchens at his most intelligent observed that men are inherently much funnier than women. He attempted to supply several answers for this, but I believe I have a very simple one. Recently I tried to teach the card game Doubt, or BS, to a large number of Japanese children. This is a simple game where lying gradually becomes inevitable and players are rewarded for spotting the lies of others. Boys and mixed-sex groups picked up the rules quickly. But one group was consisted entirely of little girls, and none of them were willing to accuse their friends of lying. I understood the sincerity of their sweet intentions immediately, but the game as they played it was no fun.
I’ve written an essay for the popular, well-respected Internet journal Gornahoor called “Players and Pugilists“, on the degrading nature of acting in traditional society. Check it out over there, and leave a comment if you like it. You may need to bump up the font size on your browser by pressing Ctrl+Plus.
Site news, June 11: The spam blocker on this blog was just too much of a pain, so I switched to Disqus. Comments should reappear shortly.
I received an anonymous email about a book review I wrote on Amazon. The author did not reply to my reply. Feeling a bit underwhelmed by our conversation, I here post my reply for public consumption.
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Cool, thanks for the e-mail! The book [The Trickster and the Paranormal] did leave an impression on me after all, although Randi’s Prize made a much deeper impression simply for the author’s impeccable devotion to leaving all options on the table. Randi’s Prize really changed my entire worldview from left-skeptic to right-occultist, and it was the end of a long process that began with Nietzsche and went through Oswald Spengler and Julius Evola.
Accordingly, I don’t subscribe to the current left-wing academic thesis that holds that some group of people today are responsible for all the problems in the world, and the solutions must be provided by everyone else. Neither do I think that there is no such thing as a universal in human society! So I was not at all inclined against Hansen’s theory from the outset; just because Jung is usually wrong does not mean he can’t be right sometimes. But it is very difficult to prove a universal, so I when I go cross-cultural, as I am planning to do in my parahistory book, I tread carefully and take local, involved opinions (called “emic” accounts in anthropology) seriously. If we want to ask whether a trickster metaphor is relevant to any given society, we must look at the language that people are using and see if they are using language that we can identify as trickster. In the case of Japan, the answer is clear beyond a doubt. Trickster spirits are real in Japan, but they are low-level annoyances who you don’t want interfering with serious spiritual business. The Japanese word for Ouija board literally is literally written with the names of tricksters.
The relationship of charismatic power to traditional power is a tricky one. Charismatic power is, after all, populism. Beginning with Jesus the West has really been on a journey figuring out how to embrace populism without losing material power. This led first to the Catholic Church who very earnestly empowered anyone with spiritual talent and suffered materially for doing so, then to the invention of secular politics, which in its final, democratic form actually gives a voice to the grossest kind of charismatic power as long as it conforms to established rules. The marginalization of non-secular charisma as “religion” is a byproduct of this, but this should not imply to the informed reader that the West hates charisma itself. Loving Obama and hating the Pope is actually an embrace of charismatic power over traditional power.
In Japan the question of “church and state” is meaningless because there was never a church. Since c.1867 when the word for religion was invented in Japan, and increasingly since 1945 with the American occupation, there has been a discourse on religion and religious corporations, and the spiritual leaders I referred to in my review were all involved in this discourse. But I regard this as playing catch-up with the Western ability to harness the populace for materialist world-building activities. It will last as long as the project of modernity remains feasible.
Modernity is a becoming, a transient state that arises, and we side with Spengler and differ from both Evola and Guénon in considering it a state which is unavoidable. The attitude towards material conditions which existed before modernity was one of essential ignorance and disinterest, except when specific areas of knowledge had to be mastered to achieve higher ends. It is not shocking to see human beings move from ignorance to knowledge in any field. Rather, it should be expected and appreciated, even when we understand the metaphysical shortcomings of a given age.
In Spengler we have no problem identifying the origin of modernity and materialism. After Nietzsche, Spengler places modernity squarely on the shoulders of Christianity’s “Jewish hatred” of the priestly caste and promise of initiation for the many, a process which gave all of Europe over to spiritual ecstasy for some centuries, but eventually led to Faustian populism. This “Jewish hatred” or “slave morality” is better worded as a disrespect by the captive Jews for foreign priests, converted by Jesus into a disrespect for Jewish priests, converted by Paul into a disrespect for pagan priests, which centuries later, through the difficult work of many smart men, became a disrespect for all priests who claim divine right and duty to the above, rather than popular right and duty to the below. All this is dependently arisen and its origin may be interpreted metaphysically as either historical Becoming or superhistorical Being, depending on how much you like Judaism.
Evola differs from Spengler in seeing modernity as a dark force that can arise at any time, just as Tradition can be restored at any time. In Revolt, which may be regarded as definitive, Evola states that “the fact that civilizations of the traditional type are found in the past becomes merely accidental: the modern world and the traditional world may be regarded as two universal types and two a priori categories of civilization.” In Imperialismo pagano, however, we find that “Christianity is at the root of the evil that has corrupted the West.” This is odd for a work that is almost completely based on Guénon, who viewed Catholic Christianity as a Tradition among peers. Later Evola joins up with Nietzsche and creates a sort of spiritual anti-Semitism, objecting both to “Jewish hatred” and to contemporary attempts to dilute European tradition by involving Jews and other minorities, although he was careful to declaim that many of the people he was objecting to were of Christian European origin. Note that Nietzsche’s slave morality does not force the Jews themselves to be modern, only the Christians who modified their metaphysics. In any case Christianity is here part of the development of what would later be modernity, and in his writings Evola consistently regards any return to Christianity as trying to roll a ball back up a slope, rather than finding metaphysical certainty in a Tradition that was not part of the development of modernity.
In placing the origin of modernity Guénon, the lover of Christianity, has a harder time than Evola. His strongest attempt, I think, is found in Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power. First he asserts the absolute nature of anti-traditional, devolving thought, using the example of the revolts of the Kshatriyas to show how breaks with tradition can appear at any time. Of course, our modernity originated in Europe and not India. Actually, using the Indian example gives Guénon some trouble, because what did Europe have that India lacked, other than Christianity? As a result we are taken of a tour of Philip the Fair, who curtailed the Knights Templar and wrought an increased focus on temporal order, which eventually led to Protestantism, which was soon placed in the hands of Anglo-Saxon rationalism, which, united with French anti-monarchism, at long last gives us secular materialism. Guénon explains the origin of modernity as far as: “There is a kind of political (and therefore entirely external) unity that implies a disregard, if not the denial, of the spiritual principles that alone can establish the true and profound unity of a civilization.” But he fails to explain to us what gave this anti-spiritual concept the necessary power in Europe where it failed in India.
In fact, Guénon’s narrative can be reconciled entirely with Nietzsche (per Spengler), who seems uninterested in the years 300-1300. Guénon provides us with the additional data of European royalty as a kind of Kshatriya caste, slowly developing out of the ruins of the Roman Empire in accordance with the new Christian tradition. Without Nietzsche’s slave morality, though, we cannot see how so many elements could have brought us to materialism; it looks like a staggering number of coincidences at work, all involving elements which seem to lack the necessary uniqueness. Are we to regard the Chinese or Japanese, for example, as insufficiently rational to bring about modernity? Did Southeast Asia lack the requisite number of kingdoms? Were India’s princes insufficiently concerned with material matters? Guénon feigns disinterest towards the entire question in East and West when he says, “We should add that when we speak of the West, we also include Judaism, which … may have even helped somewhat toward forming the modern mentality in general.” But perhaps he worried that too much interest in the Jewish element of Christianity would lead to anti-Semitic feeling, as with Nietzsche; and Guénon was attempting to boost any Tradition opposed to material modernity, so this would not have helped his thesis. It seems entirely possible that Evola did intertwine these two strands to form his own thought, although he does not usually list his influences so openly.
Modernity was born out of spiritual conditions, but it will die owing to material conditions. Christianity will not die with it; it may emerge stronger. The pagan position of Evola is one of superhistorical force and extreme radicalism, which gives power to one’s rejection of modernity, while Guenon’s embrace of Catholicism may feel metaphysically weaker, for Catholicism is now almost completely given over to modernity, but at least it accepts European heritage, the essential race-feeling of Tradition. A third option, of Western Europeans turning to Orthodox Christianity, has proven popular among Traditionalists as an alternative to either of these uncomfortable options, but it is of course a compromise. What we have described here is not an attempt to blame Christianity, nor Judaism, but rather to acquaint differentiated men with these arguments, which will hopefully aid them in finding a comfortable tradition whose language they understand and believe.
In my research on Japanese “parahistory”, the name I give to a large collection of documents in ancient languages that are claimed to have been kept secretly in the hands of shrine families for countless centuries, I am reading a lot of books, mostly written by amateur researchers who think they have discovered an amazing secret. Here is an exception: a book written by self-styled professionals, who doubt the truth of the documents. But their mentality is far less creative and positive than the amateurs, who can simply claim that they are learning the truth about Japanese history. With one exception, they really don’t have much to say in their own defense. Instead of including them in my forthcoming book I will summarize what was said here.
別冊歴史読本６４号「古史古伝の謎」 Supplemental History Readings, No. 64 “Mysteries of the Parahistories”
This is one of three “academic” Japanese books devoted to parahistory that I am aware of. You would expect these “academics” to engage in an open-minded analysis of the importance of parahistory, but they did not produce any insight so amazing I would want to include it in my book. The first five chapters are devoted to these introductory questions, but with one exception I found them unsatisfying. Outside of conveying actual historical facts, their primary goal seems to be enforcing the materialist-scientific case against the upstart amateurs.
原田実 「古史古伝」研究の状態と展望 Minoru Harada, “An Overview of the Current State of ‘Parahistory’ Research”
Harada, a scholar of the occult and of civilization, could be expected to offer a unique perspective on how parahistory changes our view of civilization. Instead, after explaining how parahistorical research was largely naïve and uncritical in the kindai, and how a second boom coincided with the Yamatai craze of the 1970s, Harada leaves only a hint of deeper analysis. He points us towards the Jewish-Italian Carlo Ginzburg’s microhistory. Ginzburg’s idea is to avoid the grand narrative of history, kings, wars, etc. and focus on small events. This approach to history is exemplified by The Cheese and the Worms (1976), a book where a 16th century dialogue between an eccentric miller and his Catholic inquistors becomes symbolic of a so-called “popular culture” of the lower classes being suppressed by “high culture”.
Here’s the problem: microhistory is neither useful nor applicable. It’s not useful because it doesn’t actually tell you what parahistory means, it just implies that it could be relevant as a “symbol” of the times. What is it a symbol of, and why? Microhistory doesn’t give you any hints; Ginzburg, for example, considers a focus on small things necessary to obtain his Marxist portrait of “the people”, a construct that he believes has been silenced by the major events of history, but I don’t think he means to limit other historians to that purpose. You can fill in the blank with whatever you like, and Harada only provides inklings of what that might be.
More importantly, microhistory is not applicable, because parahistory is not a simple instance of an ordinary event, like the miller interacting with inquisitors. In fact, parahistory is purposefully entangled with the “grand narrative” of the official Japanese histories, and as a subject of study it cannot be isolated from Japan’s “megahistory”. If any parahistory is true, the entire narrative of Japan will be changed! So, I do not consider his historiographical suggestion at all useful. In fact, this was really the worst possible paradigm to suggest for parahistory.
藤野七穂 「上記鈔訳」と”古史古伝”の派生関係 Nonao Fujio, “Deriving Connections to ‘Parahistory’ from the Uetsufumi Shouyaku“
This actually contains no explanation whatsoever of why the topic the author is studying is important. It’s a mere analysis of some of the common themes shared by the Ugaya Dynasty branch of parahistories, and the author appears to present it to readers as a sort of logic puzzle inviting further analysis, which has no meaning beyond being a fun game for old men.
北山耕平 歴史にとってヴィジョンとはなにか ～私が「偽書」から学んでいること～ Kouhei Kitayama, “What is a Historical Vision? What I Learned from the ‘Forgeries'”
I really wanted to like this essay, since the author’s tone is very clear and readable. Unfortunately, he’s also totally insane. Here’s the beginning of his “academic” rant:
Over 20 years ago, I noticed that there exists several different histories of the Japanese archipelago, looking from a different viewpoint from the “history of the Japanese nation” we and our children learn in school. Up until then, I too thought “there is only one Japanese history.” No, I should say rather “I had been convinced”. I can’t call it anything but my school’s integrated Japanization brainwashing. For the past 2000 years, we who are born as human have been educated to believe we are Japanese, humans of our country.
Basically, the author has stumbled upon an amazing revelation that education involves learning things, and when you learn a thing that means you didn’t know it before. He presents this to the world as a stunning finding which obviously implies that
us so-called “Yayoi period Japanese” are the weird ones! [Before us, Japanese people] up to the Jomon period preserved a way of life that protected the Earth for cycles of tens of thousands of years … Who is it who has been constantly discriminating against the people who lived before the Jomon period as stupid savages? Japanese history education, from that beginning until the present day’s government-administered school education, has been centered in this fascism.
I don’t know what would happen if I pointed out to the author that the existence of the Jomon people is not just an idea which fell into his head, but is another thing that was researched and taught to him, and is therefore also fascism or whatever. Would he explode? Anyway, he goes on to explain that nuclear power is akin to invading Hokkaido, because a shrinekeeper conducted a safety ceremony at a nuclear plant which proves that the Jomon period AHHHH SCREW THIS GUY
久米晶文 近代日本の異端史家とフェティシズ Masafumi Kume “Heretical History Fetishism in Kindai Japan”
Kume begins by explaining the concept of “fetishism” backwards, starting with Alfred Binet’s 19th century sexual fetishism, and then moving back to the original anthropological concept proposed by Brosses, which he then fetishizes to claim that history itself could be a fetish. The subject is not returned to, which makes me wonder why he introduced it in the first place if not to obliquely insult the concept of history. The essay continues with useful facts about parahistory but no overarching structure. In the concluding paragraph, Kume winds down his discussion with, “Therefore, parahistory is fetishism. I guess there might be some problems with that, but I think it’s a cool idea. Welp, hope you enjoyed my essay!” I don’t really have much to add to that stunning insight. Like the previous writers, he doesn’t make an effective apology for his own research.
山田雅晴 新宗教の教義に隠された古史古伝 Masaharu Yamada “Parahistory Hidden in Cult Doctrines”
I have to admit, I don’t know why this person is included in this supposedly academic book, because he himself is involved in the sale of magical amulets and other spurious items. Anyway, he just talks about the influence of the Takenouchi Documents on Mahikari, a link so prominent that American scholars have already noted it; it’s hardly “hidden”. The motive for studying parahistory would ostensibly be to help stamp out cults, but this would seem to infringe on Yamada’s own turf, as it were.
And here, finally, is the good essay. Yes, “Arafuka Michinari’s Parapsychological Approach to Prehistory Research” is the good essay, the only one that actually had an influence on the small readership of this book. Sakai, founder of the Life Energy Research Institute (生体エネルギー研究所), introduces the virtually unknown spirtualist Michinari, by way of an anecdote about a pyramid-shaped rock he found while hiking in Aomori. 「私が気付いたでなく、この巨石が気付かせたのであろうか？」 “Did I notice the rock, or was the rock brought to my attention?” he asks, segueing into a discussion of the difference between material-scientific and spiritual knowledge. I note with no small amusement that this guy is the only writer among these “academics” to actually use full citations and footnotes.
For Imura, the process of reading the ancients becomes progressively more difficult as we move backwards from medieval into classical times. Medieval writers can be sometimes understood by literate people. For the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, we have almost unintelligible language, which can be read only by specialists who constantly argue about meaning. For the Yayoi and Jomon people, though, we pass out of specialization entirely and into an entirely different, transcendental realm of knowledge: the era of the kamiyo moji, scripts of the age of the gods, whose scientific truth value is clearly in doubt, but which seem to hint at some knowledge earlier than the Kojiki. The distortion is greater as you go further back, but the “romance” increases as well.
The rest of this essay will be included in my book!
I am currently writing a book on ancient civilizations of Japan, and rumors thereof. This will include the following topics:
Himiko and Yamatai, the current academic consensus about Japan’s ancient civilization (circa 300 BCE-300 CE). This will mostly be drawn from sources already available in English.
Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, the two ancient histories of Japan which provide us with a glimpse of the heroes of prehistory. This will be drawn from Japanese sources, which are somewhat translated in English but can only be found at academic libraries or rare bookstores.
Parahistories or koshi-koden, a dozen or so documents attesting to ancient affairs on the East Asian continent, and rumors of Japan’s influence around the world. Very little of this has been translated into English so far and I will be working 70% from Japanese sources.
Hitsuki Shinji, a channeled document with strong ties to the parahistories. This topic has never been mentioned before in English. I will be doing all of the translation myself.
If you are interested in these topics, whether you are researching them yourself or you want to know more, drop me a comment on this page, or email me at and I will get back to you shortly.
I decided that the most important thing my blog could do for anyone would be to convey these quotes to people. Simply by copying and pasting them I feel that I have accomplished something.
Let’s start with my favorite thing anyone has ever said about the world we live in today. G.K. Chesterton said it.
If we all floated in the air like bubbles, free to drift anywhere at any instant, the practical result would be that no one would have the courage to begin a conversation. It would be so embarrassing to start a sentence in a friendly whisper, and then have to shout the last half of it because the other party was floating away into the free and formless ether. The two must hold each other to do justice to each other. If Americans can be divorced for “incompatibility of temper” I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced. I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.
Now, onto Heretics:
If we were to-morrow morning snowed up in the street in which we live, we should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than we have ever known. And it is the whole effort of the typically modern person to escape from the street in which he lives. First he invents modern hygiene and goes to Margate. Then he invents modern culture and goes to Florence. Then he invents modern imperialism and goes to Timbuctoo. He goes to the fantastic borders of the earth. He pretends to shoot tigers. He almost rides on a camel. And in all this he is still essentially fleeing from the street in which he was born; and of this flight he is always ready with his own explanation. He says he is fleeing from his street because it is dull; he is lying. He is really fleeing from his street because it is a great deal too exciting. It is exciting because it is exacting; it is exacting because it is alive.
The human race, according to religion, fell once, and in falling gained knowledge of good and of evil. Now we have fallen a second time, and only the knowledge of evil remains to us.
Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking about “liberty”; that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about “progress”; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about “education”; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. The modern man says, “Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty.” This is, logically rendered, “Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it.” He says, “Away with your old moral formulae; I am for progress.” This, logically stated, means, “Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle whether we are getting more of it.” He says, “Neither in religion nor morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education.” This, clearly expressed, means, “We cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children.”
“Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Winston Churchill
Finally, Orthodoxy:
The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ’s.
Oddities only strike ordinary people. Oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life.
The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the centre is not central.
There’s a lot more from this last book that I’m currently chewing on.
