(Continued from Dromaeosaurs, the Waverley Publishing Company and the Eagle of the Ninth)
If you have a proclivity for reading, then there is undoubtedly no better place, and no worse place, to work than in a decent bookshop. While it was only W H Smug*, it was the large Chelsea branch and so stocked, as a matter of course, a goodly collection of Penguin paperbacks of both English and foreign 'classics' as well as the likes of Homer, Ovid, Petronius or Sophocles. It was, in many ways, akin to working in a library but without the Dewey system; you were not only expected to at least know the titles and authors of every book stocked and its position on the the shelves but also to be able to find it from the vaguest of descriptions by the customer, without benefit of author or proper title, just some questionable description of the plot as remembered from a drunken party two weeks before as a 'book that should be read'. Of course the downside to working in such a place is that you hand back to the company all of your hard earned wages in exchange for said paperbacks, although at least you received 25% discount on the list price.
(Being Chelsea, one had one's fair share of the icons, sort of, shopping for books there; I remember Christopher Lee - ridiculouly tall, made me feel like Kenny Baker** - Robert Vaughn -fresh from the 'Man from U.N.C.L.E' , Susannah York - and her book 'In search of Unicorns'***, Twiggy - just looking divine, and twig-like. For some reason, none of the female staff would ask for autographs; guess who got that job? It is embarrassing when you have to ask for five or six separate autographs, especially when not one is for you!)
I grew out of my adolescent pseudery only slowly. Gone were the weighty tomes of the Russians and the Italian poets, 'Divina Commedia' and 'Il Decameron', to be replaced by the more manageable but infinitely more dense works by Plato, Descartes, the well known firm of London solicitors, 'Hobbes, Locke and Jeremy Bentham', Leibnitz, Nietzsche and all those other authors with way, way too much time on their hands. Interesting, without a doubt, but not a practical idea among them about how one SHOULD live one's life than Enid Blyton had. I definitely felt that, in some very arcane fashion, I had actually gone backwards from my earliest reading experiences. And it made my head hurt! Needless to say, I gave up on being a pseud thereafter, although the withdrawal was painful.
There is one notable exception in all of this. Two works by the same philosopher which had a profound and far-reaching impact on my own views; 'The open society and its enemies' and 'Objective Knowledge' by Karl Popper. The first made me realise that Marxism was just Utopianism wearing a different coat and not science as Marx had wished us to believe it was; the second made me begin to realise what science actually was and what it was not.
'Objective Knowledge' fueled in me an intense desire to think like a scientist without wishing necessarily to become one myself. By that time, my early to mid-twenties, I was already too steeped in the arts to think of changing tack; what I wanted was to be a painter! Nonetheless, it led to ten years of reading scientific and medical journals every week, reading everything I could lay my hands on, and could understand, in the fields of physics, evolutionary biology and paleontology; led me to Dick Feynman and Stephen Jay Gould.
I should perhaps mention in passing the outstanding, for me, novel of that period; a novel which I still occasionally re-read, to remind myself of what I used to be like; 'The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever' by Stephen Donaldson, all twelve hundred or so pages. With more than a passing nod, both explicitly and implicitly, to Tolkien, it tells the tale of a leper 'transported' to a fantasy world in which magic is a reality, although he does not have the power to wield it. In addition, the exigencies of his 'real' existence as a leper preclude him from permitting himself to believe in the reality of the world that he is now a part of. His solution, ultimately to the problem of his 'Unbelief' and the pain and the damage that he causes because of it is, perhaps, a little trite but nevertheless eased my own soul at the time; I found too many parallels with my life at the time. This is surely the meaning of our favourites, whether in literature, art - pictorial or sculptural, music; that they have an effect, a resonannce, not in any way connected to the work's intrinsic worth, unlike any other, or perhaps only a very small number of other such works.
By the time I had got to the end of my third decade, little gave me the 'wow' factor and nothing now does. I have retained my deep affection for the poet, Roger McGough, and of the literary endeavours of Jorge Luis Borges. I still rate 'QED: the strange theory of light and matter' by Dick Feynman as the best book ever written about science for the non-scientist (or more properly the non-phycisist) and I would buy Dan Dennett's or Douglas Hofstadter's collected grocery lists if they published them. Perhaps I am getting old, too old to be surprised, envigorated, amazed; too old for anythings to impress.
At a very basic level, the favoured works of others, in whatever medium, and whatever their talent, or lack of it, tells us in many ways who we are, not who we would wish to be. Despite my past protestions to the contrary, I know that I am a dyed-in-the-wool romantic because every year, at least once, I sit down and watch 'Casablanca'. I know, however I might try to hide it, that I am a just a little bit anarchic because I truly desire to be like Obelix. I know that I am truly an atheist, not an agnostic, because Dennett means more than mere words to me. And I know that I am still a pseud, no matter how much I try to avoid it, because otherwise I wouldn't be writing this drivel, now would I?****
* The name, common in the seventies for the stationers, newsagent and booksellers, W H Smith and Son
** The man inside R2D2.
*** I once spent a whole week in the airless and torrid bowels of the basement, amidst the dust and mouse droppings (and hordes of Tuareg tribesmen), desperatelt trying to clear space in the stock-room for the pantechnicon-loads of copies of said book which arrived in the week before a 'signing'. I wish I knew what happened to my signed copy because it's not on the shelf!
**** After all, who else but a pseud would insert footnotes in a blog?
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