Algernon Blackwood

I read something recently about the medical definitions of illusion and hallucination. An illusion is a misconception: the humming of the refrigerator perceived as someone chanting something in a foreign language, or a crumpled autumn leaf taken for a sparrow. There’s always some basis for an illusion, whereas a hallucination arises unaided from the mind of the beholder.

Does it? So said the article, written by a man taking drugs to combat Parkinson’s. There was no mention of the possibility of external sources, or of factoring these mind-altering drugs into a discussion of metaphysics.

I’m still pondering the nature of reality and the ways in which people deal with it, avoid it, or somehow alter it to suit themselves. I’m wondering why some people literally live to find an answer to the eternal questions, agreeing with Hermann Hesse that “Every man’s life is a road toward himself,” while others relate to these concepts--life or afterlife, dreaming or awake, conscious or subconscious--only during rare moments of crisis.

Who are the mystics and visionaries and who are the lunatics and the mentally ill, assuming there’s a difference? Are they arbitrary definitions, depending only on a judgment of competence? Is one person’s vision another’s hallucination because the first person handles it calmly and the second flies off the handle? Or are the experiences realms apart?

I’m also cleaning out my personal library, taking stock of the books I think of as “keepers,” which I plan to reread or use as reference, and those worth reading that I’d urge on my friends. Meanwhile I’m always hungry for new books and looking for recommendations. There are many places online to find booklists, but I have yet to find one ambitious enough to embrace every variety of book that touches on the nature of reality: fiction of all sorts, myths and legends, poetry, non-fiction from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, journals, letters, biography, art…. So I’m going to take a stab at posting one here, not by harvesting all the titles I can find, but in the course of a leisurely, once a month discussion of ideas old and new which I hope others will add to as they stumble into my virtual woods.

I’m eager to read Mike Ashley’s biography of Algernon Blackwood, and to re-read my collection of Blackwood's supernatural fiction. I consider it a crime that his A Prisoner in Fairyland is out of print! It is online, thanks to Project Gutenberg: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=6021

More on Algernon Blackwood next month. In the meantime, here’s a link to information about him, and an interview with Ashley: http://hem.fyristorg.com/bd/ab/index.html

Thanks for stopping by!