Abstract
How hard it was to describe things. How hard it was to see things. He wondered if, since he had completely given up drinking, he had actually been able to see more. … Any departure from total sobriety seemed to damage his perception. Even yet he was not sober enough, not quite enough, to take in the marvels that surrounded him. The ecstatic flight of a pigeon, the communion of two discarded shoes, the pattern on a piece of processed cheese. His Notebook of Particulars was in its third volume, and still he was simply learning to look. He knew that this, for the present, was all of his task. The great things would happen later when he was ready for them.
‘We invent man because we do not know how to observe him.’ Gérard de Nerval
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Bibliography
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (London, 1967) 5
Frank Kermode, Continuities (London, 1967). 5
Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of As If, trans. C. K. Ogden (London, 1924). 5
Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (London, 1984). 7
Wallace Stevens, ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’, in The Auroras of Autumn (1950); reprinted in Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (London, 1969). 8
Gabriel Josipovici, The World and the Book (London, 1971). 10
Roland Barthes, Le degré Zero de l’écriture (Paris, 1953). 19
Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes (New York, 1961). 20
Ian Gregor and Mark Kinkead-Weekes, William Golding: A Critical Study (London, 1967). 24
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© 1973 Patrick Swinden
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Swinden, P. (1973). Nothing but the Truth. In: Unofficial Selves. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-01760-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-01760-7_1
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