Cinema, despite its thunderous claims to originality, is in truth a great necromancer. It raises the dead more often than it invents the living, and its spirits wear borrowed costumes even when paraded as new. When James Wan and Leigh Whannell conjured Insidious, they weren’t scribbling out some pristine mythology in a Hollywood boardroom but … Continue reading Dreams That Wander Too Far: From Plato to The Further
Tag: existentialism
The Forgotten Divinity: On The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
“Great Pan is not dead, but sleeping; and the reed shall sound again at the hour of need.” - Adapted from Plutarch It’s a curious feature of English children’s literature that its most enchanting works are often its most subversive. Carroll slipped logic puzzles and ontological riddles into Alice; Tolkien smuggled Catholic theology into hobbit … Continue reading The Forgotten Divinity: On The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
The Ship of Theseus: A Nation Adrift on Rotten Planks
Plutarch’s riddle is older than our language but no less urgent for its age. If every plank of Theseus’ ship were replaced, was it still the same vessel? The Athenians insisted that it was - because their pride needed it to be so. Hobbes, less sentimental, pressed the matter: what if the discarded planks were … Continue reading The Ship of Theseus: A Nation Adrift on Rotten Planks
The Wooden Shadow: Laura Purcell’s Silent Companions and the Gothic of Hollow Lives
Laura Purcell’s The Silent Companions - a book which proves, if nothing else, that the Victorians couldn’t leave well enough alone. If it wasn’t séances or table-tipping, it was cardboard aristocrats painted to look like Aunt Mildred, propped up in drawing rooms like the world’s most unnerving IKEA mannequins. History assures us they were ‘decorative,’ … Continue reading The Wooden Shadow: Laura Purcell’s Silent Companions and the Gothic of Hollow Lives
The Repudiators and the Inheritance of the West
“A culture of repudiation has taken hold among our elites, who will celebrate every culture but their own, and who see in the inheritance of the West not an achievement to be cherished but a crime to be atoned for.” - Sir Roger Scruton There’s something eerily biblical about Scruton’s lament. I think of the … Continue reading The Repudiators and the Inheritance of the West
Wording 