Stranger on Earth

Dear Herr Hesse, I know you’ve been dead since 1962, a good ten years before I was born, and my writing to you may come across as a mad gesture the likes of which only the overly obsessed are capable of. I can assure you I’m not mad, even though everyone around me is. I’ve just finished reading your 1919 novel Demian , which you wrote when you’re on the brink of madness (Was the war that bad? Why did all those young men have to die?), and which made you what my generation calls an “overnight sensation” among the disillusioned young. Before I started reading the book, I’d wondered why it’d had such an effect on the young men of the 1910s (and also those of the following decades). It’s just a book, I thought. Aren’t we exaggerating? But I should’ve known. Your Siddhartha has after all been my personal guide since I first read it in 2004, so why should this one be made of lesser stuff? The actor/scholar James Franco, a young(ish) man of my generation, wrote a new introduc...

Link to Part 1:  http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.nl/2012/11/the-thinking-mans-bible-and-messiah.html Of all the accusations Nietzsche hurls at Christianity, it is the sanctification of untruths concerning earthly matters that is the gravest: God is a thought that makes all that is straight crooked and all that stands giddy. What? Would time be gone and all that is transitory only a lie? … I call it evil and misanthropic, all this teaching about the one and the perfect and the unmoved and the sufficient and the intransitory. All that is intransitory – that is but an image! ( On the Blissful Islands , 110-11) Nietzsche claims that Christian belief inculcates the wrong perception of reality in the believer. The belief in an unchanging, perfect God is philosophically false, since nothing in the universe we inhabit is “intransitory.” Everything is always in flux, and divine constancy can be nothing but a deception. For Nietzsche (or Zarathustra), co...

The perception of literature is culture-specific. Depending on where you are in the world and which educational system you find yourself in, literature is served up in a certain way – sometimes a little unpalatably. One of the common misconceptions about literature is that it must have a “moral message” – an idea stemming from, and I am generalising, conservative, retrograde, over-religious cultures. The tendency to moralise literature may seem innocuous, but if you turn the matter over a few times in your head, you will see that the damage it does to an individual’s interpretive faculties is considerable. This is because when one is constantly told to search for moral messages in works of art, one ends up assuming that all art is moral, which, as most of us know, is a gross generalisation. The person told to do so constantly will go through life thinking every word, act, and decision comes with a clear moral code.  More often than not, the morals we are force-fed fail ...

A short entry about orthodoxy before I post the second part of the analytical essay on Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 next week.  While reading a short story entitled “Augustine de Villeblanche or Love’s Strategy” by the Marquis de Sade (not exactly a historical figure you would go to for moral rectitude), I came across the following fascinating passages on why human beings feel the need to judge, condemn, and censor others who hold different beliefs and values from them: The most foolish thing of all … is to blush about the penchants that Nature has given us. And to make fun of anyone, simply because his or her tastes are unusual, is just as barbaric as railing against someone who was born lame, or blind in one eye. But trying to convince fools of these reasonable concepts is like trying to halt the stars in their courses. People seem to take a kind of prideful pleasure in mocking “defects” that they themselves do not possess, and they apparently derive such enjoyment – e...

Long before the 1000-page 1Q84 draws to a close with the saccharine reunion of its two main protagonists, Tengo and Aomame, Murakami broaches the subject of religious orthodoxy and its effects on Literature – respectively represented by Sakigake (a secretive religious organisation legally sanctioned by the Japanese government) and the ghost-written fantasy novella Air Chrysalis . Although the premise of this subject was never fully explored (perhaps it was never Murakami’s intention), due to the novel’s shift to Tengo and Aomame’s love story in Book 3, enough of it inhabits the unconventional world of 1Q84 to warrant an in-depth discussion. Sakigake is an exclusive religious community (not at all unlike Aum, the sect that launched the Tokyo gas attacks in 1995, which Murakami had extensively dealt with in the probing Underground ) that thrives on secrecy and the vague, mystical promise of salvation. We catch a glimpse of its interior through the descriptions of several charac...