The First Philosophers

Oxford World Classics

The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists

Personally I like philosophers who don’t just talk the talk but walk the walk. Take Diogenes; he turned social criticism into a performing art. Aptly named the Dog, he lived in a trashcan in the middle of Athens marketplace, and took to censuring his fellow citizens: Masturbating in the street, defecating in theatres, and urinating on his enemies, were his hallmark protests. We will also find him strolling about town in daylight with a lit lamp proclaiming: ‘I am just looking for an honest man!’ Diogenes was a precursor to Rousseau, because he saw civilization as a prison, and obviously just wanted to be free - this is why he is known as the father of Cynicism. 

Of course, Diogenes may not be to everyones taste. If we want to something more Zen, then we can try Heraclitus who offered maxims like: ‘It is not possible to step into the same river twice,’ ‘everything flows,’ and ‘dying is all we see while asleep, sleep is all we see while awake.’ This Grecian Buddha, believed the world was in perpetual flux. However, if he is a little too poetic we could pick Pythagoras: The famed mathematician who saw the world entirely by numbers. He also was also known as a magician, a vegan, a fond musician, and an advocate of reincarnation who heard the voice of dead relatives in dog barks! It was he who discovered the earth is round. 

Parmenides was similar to Heraclitus but also the exact opposite. For him, the more things change the more they stay the same. Our eyes deceive us, the world is not separate, and time is an illusion. In reality all is One and One is all: Indivisible; unborn, uncreated, and unconditioned. Poetry is not the best method to propound logic, nevertheless he argues a case: ‘It must be that what can be spoken and thought of, Is, and it is therefore being. And there is no such thing as nothing. These are the guidelines I suggest to you.’ He eventually decided: ‘It is indifferent to me where I begin, for there shall I return,’ which is perhaps why his ideas, for all there brilliance, reached a dead-end. 

Of course there were those philosophers who were scientists rather than Shamans. Democritus believed the world consisted of Void and little tiny particles called Atoms. In fact ‘the nature of the eternal, consists in minute substances infinite in number [...] to small to be perceived’ which bounce about in a ‘chaotic state.’ Whats more, ‘creation is the combination of Atoms, destruction is their dissolution, and accordingly creation is just modification.’ I’m no scientist but thats what I learnt in GCSE physics! Whats more, ‘A balanced load is better than a heavy load,’ ‘contentment comes to men from a moderate amount of enjoyment,’ and finally, ‘it is important to compare one’s own life with the life of those who are less fortunate [...] and count ones blessings.’ Word.

Sophists were the first Salesmen: Not only were they famed rhetoricians, they were also known to setup schools, charge extortionate fees, and love networking. They would be very happy in today’s world, and obviously have LinkedIn profiles and Twitter accounts, and would most likely be found in the Marketing Department. Nevertheless they also believed philosophy should not just dwell in the clouds, but come down to earth. Sophists taught their students to be savvy, rich, and successful. In doing so, they also paved the way for Sociology and Semiotics. Protagoras the founder famously said: ‘Man is the measure of all things.’ Georgias went further and declared: ‘Nothing exists; even if it exist it no human being could apprehend it; that even if it were apprehended, still it could not be explainable to our neighbour.’ Ah, we all ready see our ancestral Nietzsches here! Sophists believed in relativity, but they were also Postmodernists. All Values have equal validity, but the accepted Value is the one that fits into the ideological discourse. I.E. knowledge is a byproduct of language.  

This Oxford World Classics edition is a great little gem for it offers a concise summary of all those Wisdom-lovers who paved the way for Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Not to mention Descarte, Kant,  Hume, Mill, Hegel, and Wittgenstein. All the present day scientists, psychologists, sociologists, and politicians. Even the lawyers, judges, fat cats and professors. In fact, every branch of human knowledge, can be traced back down a golden path to Ancient Greece. And I’m sure there are some latter-day Diogenes yet. 

The War Against God: The Top Three Promethean Heroes in Literature

The War Against God: Top Three Promethean heroes in Literature

It started with the ousted Titan, who stole fire from the God’s and gave it to humanity. Punished for his iniquity and generosity in equal measure, Zeus, had him chained to a rock for all eternity, while birds devoured his liver. Then there is the Fallen Angel himself, Lucifer also aptly known as ‘the Bringer of Light.’ His first appearance, Genesis, in the slippery form of a serpent. Picture Eve standing before the tree of knowledge, pride of place in the Garden of Eden and being told: ‘The day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.’ If the answer is food for thought, then surely knowledge is a good thing? And if fire lights up darkness, then it is a cooking utensil of some capacity. Classical and Religious, the two archetype blasphemers of literature, who defy the gods out of their love of humanity, but there are more. Here are my top three:

Satan, Milton’s Paradise Lost 

Surely the most humane and complex Satan ever seen yet. As Blake declared: ‘'The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and so of the Devil's party without knowing it.' True poet? We can only assume Blake means a writer obligated to truth and sincerity. Milton, like all great artists, can’t help but be a humanitarian, and unwittingly instills this in his diabolical creation. 

Nevertheless we first find Satan, post-rebellion, chained to a lake of fire down in the deepest reaches of Hell. Fitting punishment for a disastrous coup, and a presumptuous challenge to Jehovah’s might. Yet despite the new lodgings Satan will not seek forgiveness, nor kneel. He declares: ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven [...] Here at least we shall be free [...] Awake arise or be for ever fallen.’ These are the words of a emancipator.

Milton also notes Satan is Romantic soul, and quite willing to admit he possesses ‘dauntless courage,’ capable of ‘remorse and passion,’ and that despite his new lodgings he and his fellow brethren can ‘ease out their pain by work and endurance.’ Again this suggests a humanitarian spirit of triumph in adversity. A pragmatic attitude to say the least, which would be well adduced in heaven, hell and indeed earth.

 However, like any latter-day revolutionary, Satan is not perfect. He is prone to rashness, pride and ambition. He is also overzealous with his guns, which is why he is locked down in the inferno in the first place. Flashback to the war in heaven: ‘Chariots and flaming arms and fiery steeds [...]  Those deep throated engines belched [...] with outrageous noise the air and all her entrails tore.’ Alas, the Devil has graduated from his days as the wily serpent, he is now a gristled soldier and statesman a democratic one at that. Of course he has not had the luxury to read Animal Farm and is unable to foresee his revolution is doomed to failure. However as it stands, we have to admire his motive, for he believes election should not be based on divine precedent, but native equality.

God created the world and a lovely little garden and decided something was missing. Out of boredom perhaps, not to mention clay, he moulded our ancestor Adam. Adam also has his grievances, for we find him in Eden already apostrophizing the silent sky: ‘Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man? did I solicit thee, from darkness to promote me. or here place in this delicious garden? [...] Inexplicable thy justice seems!’ 

And here we come to the crux: Adam’s argument is the same as Satan’s. This shows one of two things: Either God is a shoddy artisan and made a man, who is a little too rebellious, and a little too much like those traitors below. Or, more likely, Satan is a little more humane than angelic, a tad more human than divine. 

Both Adam’s words and Satan’s speeches are for us earthlings, for we too are thrown into the world, conscripted to live life and we make the best of it come what will. What’s more, lest we forget, there are communities and individuals in all parts of the world who really are disenfranchised. Christopher Hitchens quite rightly labelled God A Kim Jong Il presiding over a North Korea, and we the oppressed multitude. Satan speaks for them and for us, who also wonder at the incomprehensible laws of the universe. 

At last at one late point Satan stops for a moment to meditate on his madness: ‘The Evil one abstracted stood from his own evil and for a time remained stupidly good,’ and here Milton reveals his conceit. If Satan is good in the abstract, then he is bad in the real. Why? Because God’s abstract kingdom nevertheless has the ability to throw out real jail-time and punishment. Satan’s predilection for being ‘stupidly good,’ reveals his innate worth. He has become bad by circumstances and this is similar to us human beings. Like him we are trapped in the real world of cause and effect, and this is why we are both victim and victimizer, guilty and innocent at the same time. If we all lived in the abstract, then of course we would also be ‘stupidly good’ but we don’t. We live in the real world with real problems. As such Satan shows us, the evils of the world are not metaphysical anomalies, but readily explainable by reason. Not only is Milton party to the devil without knowing it, the devil is party to humanity (but perhaps in this case he does know it)

Captain Ahab, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

The deranged captain of the Pequod whaling ship is leading his fellow sailors on insane quest through the Pacific ocean to hunt down and kill the mythical white whale Moby Dick. Captain Ahab is rightful namesake to his Old Testament predecessor: The wicked demon worshipper and King of Israel who while in command committed ‘more evil than all the kings before him’ and even more wickedly all ‘in the sight of the Lord above.’ 

So we welcome Captain Ahab who ascends the throne of blasphemy. What better way to coronate his new status, than a ritual baptism in fire, for it is out in a lighting storm the hero becomes Prometheus and Lucifer combined: ‘Look aloft! cried Starbuck. The Corpusants! The Corpusants! All the yard arms tripped with pallid fire; and touched with each tri-pointed lighting rod with three tapering white flames, each of all three masts was silently burning.’ ‘Mark it well’ Ahab bellows: ‘I now know that thy right worship is defiance [....] Thou clear spirit of fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back.’ This captain is marked for martyrdom. 

On deck he is a cantankerous disciplinarian: ‘a hard driver’ is old Ahab, who has ‘driven one leg to death, and spavined the other for life.’ He also displays a morbid disposition: ‘joy and sorrow, hope and fear seemed ground to the finest dust [...] in the clamped mortar of Ahab’s iron soul [....] His whole life become one watch on deck.’ So what for that? Despite his difficult personality the captain is never truly evil. In fact his heart is good. We are told ‘from beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.’ 

Clearly one of those tragic heroes, a sick suffering soul, without much hope of a happy ending. And yet where does his blasphemy lie? The answer resides in Moby Dick. For this is not simply any ordinary sea creature, but the primordial Leviathan created by God in the first six days of creation. As such it is personification of God’s omnipotence, and Ahab knows it: ‘The white whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them [...]  All that most maddens and torments [...] All the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab were visibly personified and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all general rage and hate felt by his whole race [...] And as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.’ 

Needless to say, Ahab’s can only conceive of God as the only true Devil, for it is the very whiteness of the whale that scares him the most. White is the ‘crowning attribute of the terrible.’ ‘the very veil of the Christian deity’ yet the most ‘appalling to mankind,’ because it is also the colour of God’s absence and our loss.

Ahab is Prometheus and aims to bring colour and light back to the world. His hatred for Moby Dick is the sum of humanity’s hatred and fear of all the riddles that haunt this mortal life: Old age, sickness, suffering and death, all witnessed on the backdrop of the arbitrary Laws of the universe.

Towards the end, Ahab at last reveals his essence: ‘I feel deadly faint, bowed and humped as though I were Adam staggering beneath the piled up centuries since paradise [...] Whose to doom when the judge himself [should] be dragged to the bar?’ ‘Were I the wind I’d blow no more on such a wicked miserable world.’ Why such a negative view you might ask? and the captain replies: ‘Ahab never thinks he only feels, feels, feels!’ ‘God only has the right and privilege [to think] and our poor hearts throb.’ Ahab is not interested in intellectual philosophy, all he knows is real heartfelt emotion. He rejects the cosmic order on account of his fellow mortals, who are made to bear the indiscriminate whims of fortune, and out of love for humanity, hunts down the tyrant God personified in that audacious white whale Moby Dick. 

Ivan Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov

James Joyce once said: ‘The Brothers Karamazov made a deep impression on me [....] Madness you may call it, but therein may be the secret of his genius[...] I prefer the word exaltation, exaltation which can merge into madness. In fact all great men have had that vein in them; it was the source of their greatness’ Dostoevsky’s seminal masterpiece is now considered one the greatest works of the Western Canon. Admirers include, Freud, Kafka, Rowan Williams, Pope Benedict, and even Albert Einstein. As for the Karamazov’s, they are a dysfunctional family, of impassioned men, but it is Ivan who towers above all.

 ‘Ivan is a sphinx,’ ‘Ivan is a tomb’ ‘Ivan is a riddle’ ‘Ivan is not one of us’ ‘People like Ivan are like a cloud of dust.’ So the pronouncements follow our Promethean hero, yet every grave must contain its treasure, and every puzzle must be placed. After meeting his youngest brother Alyosha in the pub, Ivan yields up his secret: ‘I have lost faith in life [....] Everything is a disorderly, damnable, and perhaps devil-ridden chaos.’ Whats more of God’s majesty he admits: ‘Although I know it exists, I don't accept it at all.’  However, like all Promethean heroes he cannot shake off his divine heritage. He admits: ‘like a child I believe that suffering will be healed and made up for [...] That in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity.’ For most that should be enough, but not for Ivan: ‘Though all that may come to pass, I don't accept it. I won't accept it. [...] That's what's at the root of me, Alyosha; that's my creed.’ Alyosha being a recently cloistered Monk quite rightly calls this Rebellion of the Satanic form, but Ivan’s war against God is really a humanitarian one. 

He remarks to Alyosha: ‘You see, I am fond of collecting certain facts, and, would you believe, I even copy anecdotes of a certain sort from newspapers and books, and I've already got a fine collection.’ What follows is a list of atrocities. Stories of rape, torture and infanticide, child abuse, and murder, and genocide. After working himself into a masochistic frenzy Ivan cries: ‘Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it?’ ‘While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in the stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to dear, kind God! [...] They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony.’ ‘From love for humanity [...] I hasten to give back my entrance ticket.’ 

Alyosha contends, What about the our Saviour. Doesn’t he count for something? Ivan is ready, not just with more grievances, but armed with a parable that will rival any of Christs. He calls his story: ‘The Grand Inquisitor.’  The ‘story is laid in Spain, in Seville, in the most terrible time of the Inquisition where fires were lighted every day to the glory of God.’ In the midst of such horrors the Son of God decides to reappear: ‘In His infinite mercy He came once more among men [....] The sun of love burns in His heart [...] He holds out His hands to the people, blesses them, and a healing virtue comes from contact with Him.’ Yet all is not well: ‘the Grand Inquisitor, passes by the cathedral [...] An old man, almost ninety, tall and erect, with a withered face and sunken eyes.’ He is outraged by Jesus’s return and quickly arrests him. In the dungeon they confront each other, and the cosmic battle between Hell and Heaven begins. 

The Inquisitor cries: ‘Is it Thou? [....] Don't answer, be silent [...] I know too well what Thou wouldst say. And Thou hast no right to add anything to what Thou hadst said of old [...] why has Thou come to hinder us?’ 

Now for scripture.Matthew 4:1-11, Mark 1: 12-13, and Luke 4:1-13. The devil is out in the the wilderness of the Judaean desert ready to confront Christ: Temptation One: ‘If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread [...] and Jesus answered, It is written: Man shall not live on bread alone.’ Yet in today’s world, what could be more appalling than poverty? The inquisitor ratifies: ‘There is no crime, and therefore no sin; there is only hunger. Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!’For the second temptation: ‘The devil led Christ up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world And he said to him, I will give you all their authority and splendor [...] Worship me, it will all be yours.’ Christ retorts ‘worship the lord your god and serve him only.’ Yet what can be more sensible than uniting a divided earth under one banner? The inquisitor remarks: ‘We took from Him Rome and the sword of Caesar, and proclaimed ourselves sole rulers of the earth [...] We shall plan the universal happiness of man.’ For the final temptation, ‘the devil led Jesus to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple, If you are the Son of God, he said, throw yourself down, for it is written He will command his angels concerning you to guard you safely’ Christ retorts, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ However, what could affirm life more than a true miracle? The inquisitor snaps: ‘Thou didst refuse  [....] Thou didst proudly and well, like God; but the weak, unruly race of men, are they gods? [...] Is the nature of men such, that they can reject miracle, and at the great moments of their life, the moments of their deepest, most agonizing spiritual difficulties, cling only to the free verdict of the heart?’

The inquisitor is triumphant: Feed the world, rule the world, and present miracles to the world, and the world will be healed. He declares:‘Know that I fear Thee not [....] I awakened and would not serve madness. I turned back and joined the ranks of those who have corrected Thy work.’ ‘Or Dost Thou care only for the tens of thousands of the great and strong? [...] We care for the weak too.’

Of course, Ivan’s parable is just that. Like Prometheus this Karamazov must pay the price for challenging the God’s majesty. He descends into full blown psychosis, and instead of meeting Jesus, he meets Satan in the form of a terrible hallucination. And it really is terrible for this is a ‘paltry devil’ who wears ‘a brownish reefer jacket, rather shabby’ and ‘who goes to the public baths.’ This is not an Archfiend to match Ivan’s expectations. So it follows Ivan bears humanity’s suffering alone. His gift of fire that he stole from the Christian God, cannot be shared amongst his peers, but instead consumes his heart. 

Why I Write

Why I Write.

‘Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.’ Graham Greene

‘I am a poet, a seeker and a confessor, obligated to truth and sincerity. I have a charge, albeit small and confined: To help others seekers to understand and to cope with the world, if only by assuring them that they are not alone’ Hermann Hesse.

I could call upon the dozens of writers to furnish the answer to why I write, but in truth, the above quotes just about sum it up for me. The first is true of now, the second is what I one day hope for. Even if this dream doesn’t work out, I hold my vocation close to my heart, because this is the meaning behind it, successful or not. 

For me writing is a healing activity, it helps me make sense of the chaos that I find inside of myself, and the chaos I find in the world. It reconciles me to any pain I feel or have felt and restores me with new hope for the future. As my favourite author says:

 ‘It is the fate of some people to experience life mostly as sorrow and pain, not only in theory, in a sort of literary aesthetic pessimism but bodily and actually. These persons, among whom I alas belong, have more talent for experiencing pain than for experiencing pleasure. Breathing and sleeping, eating and digesting, all the simplest functions cause them pain and distress rather than pleasure. Now despite all this, following a law of nature, these people find in themselves an impulse to affirm life, to find pain good, not to surrender, and so they are extraordinarily obsessed with everything that can give them some joy, can cheer them a bit, can make them feel a little happy and warm, and they attribute to all these pleasant things a worth they do not have for the ordinary industrious man.’

And this is why some strange men will forsake career, money, status, relationships and family, just to write books! I do not want to sound narcissistic here, but I know it is also true, that many people of the world, are happy well-adjusted individuals who live prosperous and fulfilling lives, without so much of a glance at the wider suffering of humanity. It is only right that they do so, for they are being true to their hearts, and if people spent too long time regarding the pain of others, then the earth would would cease to spin. Anyway, whether it is hatred of the world or love of the world that dwells in your breast, both are a form of egoism and morbidity and in the end the world will confound you! Aristotle is right: A golden mean set in the middle of extremities is the best approach to any philosophizing.

Nevertheless, it is also true, that many have the bad luck to suffer: Some out loud, some in silence, but either way, their experience counts for something too. How they feel about life is not so much a intellectual choice but an all too real destiny. Orphan Pamuk says: ‘How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?’ This is true, but I think we all have a duty to at least know the contents of our own minds. To really examine what is going on, is something we can and should do. And when we share it with sincerity, we help others.

There are better men than me who will do more: They will be doctors, social-workers, psychologists, humanitarians, relief-workers and world leaders, but for me I can only give what I have. Emotions are my dowry and thats how I pay my way in this world. My hope is, that one day, someone else, going through a similar experience, perhaps lost in darkness, may take heart from what I’ve written, and so rise to the challenge of life and carry the torch forward. Writing for me is a way to bridge the gaps that keep us apart, literature allows us to see we are not alone, and we are all in this together. 

Yet, Maya Angelo said: There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you,’ And so it is true: Sometimes sharing doesn’t work, and any help you think you can give, isn’t acceptable to the wider public. This is where the other dimension of writing comes in. The personal side. Writing solely for oneself and for one’s own pleasure. All literature, is in some sense a confession, and an explication of that hidden part of the soul that wants to be heard. So it follows, I write, because I want to redeem my own pain, and transform it into something good. Writing as therapy!

Perhaps I am a little sloppy in my craft, because all the novels I have ever wrote, are just refracted versions of myself, only a better version! A hero who starts out with losses, but in the course of the story accumulates riches, begins in despair and ends in exaltation. Freud would call it simply wish-fulfillment: That because I don’t have control over my own life, I compensate by exerting control through writing, and live out my dreams by the quill. In many respects he is right, but it is more than that. For me the task is spiritual. Writing a story is a way to recapture my lost dream of happiness, and my own small prayer to God, even if it goes unanswered. 

I spend hours on it, think about it all day and night, obsess and fret, just to make it perfect; not just in what happens, but in the words, for I want every word to be count. Though it be driven by a kind of compulsion, for me it is something I will always cherish, and always love. A life perfected is a good life, even if it only resides on the page. 

Somewhere along the way, I too developed a knowledge of this so called ‘aesthetic’ and ‘literary pessimism’, and so my works, are distorted! They are filled with chimeras and demons, saints and sinners. I have drawn on Dante, Milton, Dostoevsky and Melville, Levi and Mccarthey. I don’t say this to brag, after all I am a jobbing hack as of yet, I say it only to show that I have masked the true meaning of what I write. But thats the point: So has every other artist, for all this talk about Romanticism, Modernism and Postmodernism, is a deliberate and audacious lie. All writers, no matter how much they dress their work up in literary regality, really write solely to express themselves.

And so in conclusion, it is about helping myself, and helping others. Though every artist is doomed to die, it is the belief and solace of all art and literature, that life is worth living, and we should praise it even in the worst of times. So it follows, I’m not just engaging in a childish fantasy, cobbling out a plot and resolution because I can’t be bothered to do something more worthwhile. To me writing is the most worthwhile thing I can do. I want to bestow all my love and longing, my happiness and sorrow into what I create. I will accept nothing less than the best. Though it is an eccentric cause, it means everything to me. If it doesn’t drive me to madness and insomnia, then it hardly seems worth doing at all. In helping myself, maybe I can help others too. So that is why I write, and why my novel is not yet completed, for I am not just working on a story I am working on a dream.

Why I Read

Why I Read

‘these fragments I store against my ruins’  TS eliot, the WasteLand

‘Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them--if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.’ JD Salinger, Catcher in the Rye.

Words can’t express what literature mean to me. For me these writers, philosophers, and dreamers aren’t dead, they are alive in my heart, living and breathing, and their words blaze fire. It doesn’t matter to anyone else, but it matters to me. Some people will read a book, and feel excited by it, others will laugh or cry, some will want to escape the mundanity of existence, or seek knowledge. For me books are all of these things but more. I may sound completely eccentric but I believe literature is Sacred. There are some novels, poems and quotes, that I think about everyday, that I have sworn allegiance to, that have furnished my soul, and have taught me how to live. There is some literature that has changed my life, transformed me, that is the closest thing I know to having a faith. It is like a teacher-student relationship, and the fundamental lesson learned is how to be a better person, and reach out earnestly for that dream called happiness. 

When I went to university we sat in small dusty offices, and dissected the works of Coleridge, Keats, and Blake. We listened in lectures about the society Dickens wished to portray through his novels, the first world war’s influence on T.S Eliot, how Christianity vexed Milton, and how Robinson Crusoe is a myth of capitalism. In my Masters degree, it went much further we looked at, editions, manuscripts and theory. What constitutes an authentic work of art, which version is the best, does the author have any relevance to the article he produced. To me as much as I engaged with such questions, its was all pretty much humbug, because I was, and am, only interested in how these artists made me feel. I didn’t read Keats to learn about Romanticism I read him because his odes were beautiful and made me feel alive. I didn’t care if Camus’ philosophy was weak and unthought out compared to Sartre’s, I cared about his motive. I didn’t want to examine the minute workings of Milton mind, I wanted to be enriched by the majesty of his and feel kinship to the devil. In truth, I think the professors think the same: That the humanities in general, are really just a great and glorious game, that will actually play, not to contribute something to society, but because deep down we love it and it helps us live. This alone justifies it.

When I wrote my dissertation on Hermann Hesse, I discussed the use of symbol and image in his novels, his exile from German Society, and  his influence on Modernism. If I do a PHD, I will analyze the lyrics of 2pac, his relevance to modern culture, his existential authenticity, and relevance to the black Diaspora. These are really just elaborate cover stories. In reality, I just want to study them, because of how they make me feel. Hesse and 2pac are the two artists who have influenced me more than any other. At it is not an exaggeration to say, that in childhood, they saved my life. Thats how much they meant and still mean. 

So when it comes to why I read, the answer lies in what I writer can instill in me, wisdom and serenity, hope and happiness. I love how if I am feeling sad, I can read Hesse or listen to 2pac. I love how if I am feeling angry at the world, I can pick up the Brothers Karamazov or Pessimistic read Schopenhauer. I love how if I feel inspired, I can recite ode to a skylark or psalm to life. I love how if I feel passionate I can visit Wuthering heights, or Shakespeare’s tragedies. I love how if I need guidance, I can read Christopher Hitchens, or Dalai Lama in equal measure. 

I suppose to a certain extent this love is excessive to the normal person. It is true, it springs from my own personal problems, and my inadequate attempts in dealing with everyday life. But how beautiful, and heartening it is to know that there is commonwealth of shared experience. That although it might be glossed over in today’s world there are people suffering out there. Just to know someone else had gone through the struggle means a lot, and if I listen I will learn, and if my heart is open I will love. So what if Art is only for the sick suffering difficult men, and is no use to anyone but us maladpatives! Its enough to know its there, and it helps. I have more faith in these men than I do in any religion. 

So while others may read for pleasure, I read out of necessity. But literature, should not be used to escape life, but to awaken us to it. In reading, I have learned to live. That is why literature should not just bask in the problems of the world, but attempt to transform them through the medium of language. In modernism especially, their is a tendency to revel is despair, but it is not enough to just reflect the world’s ugliness, the world needs to be redeemed. I read Beckett, Sarah Kane, and Nietzsche at university, and was just disgusted by what critics claimed to be profound thoughts, genuine works of art, and complex innovate genre defying narratives. To me such works are appaling, because they posit a world that has no future, and no hope. Literature and art should be about helping people and restoring their optimism. As Hesse states: 

‘And these men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment's happiness is flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as their own dream of happiness.’

This is why I will always be a Romantic at heart, because even if I am intellectually persuaded by this literary despair, I could never consent to live by it. To me the fundamental point of life, and the measure of a man, is his ability to give back to others. This is what the commonwealth of artists, writers and philosophers is all about. It’s not just to alleviate my own depression that these writers exist, but to hold a little stash of noble sentiment and goodness, that will outlive all the misfortunes of history. How nice to know that these artists have been safeguarded for the future, and that through all the whims of time and place, their ideas and sentiment will remain chiseled in stone like the law of Moses. This is why I read, and why it matters.