The second of our Summer Philosophy Groups met last night. Six people joined the discussion, five apologies from people called to other things, and a promise from a bookseller in Waterstone's to come along. He said that, "nothing like that ever happens in Leicester". He never arrived, which was sad, I was looking forward to meeting him.
Our books this month were the "Reason of Things", from which we selected the sections on "Community & Society" and "Reading and Thinking", and a short essay by William Hazlitt, "On the Pleasure of Hating".
We started first with the Grayling, and the section on Community & Society. The section is composed of a series of short articles, each two or three pages long, looking in turn at Politics, Voting, Utopia, Profit, Power, Protest, Justice, Liberty and Pluralism. We stumbled over this section and the shortcomings of this style of book became apparent. Each piece was originally written as a column for a broadsheet newspaper, and is ideal for that purpose, a sort of short, secular, "thought for the day", a bon mot that engenders a feel good factor as you start your working day.
However, we can't entirely blame Dr Grayling. I was thinking as I typed the list of topics in the section, "Nothing big then", so I think we may have been over ambitious to try and have a comprehensive discussion on all of these topics in the short time available. Plus Grayling is only commenting on each of these topics, as a starting point, rather than exploring them or elucidating to any great measure. Readers commented again on Grayling's cynicism, this time directed at Politics.
We did much better with the section, "Reading and Thinking", some thirty three pages looking at The Essay, Reading and Reviewing, Biography, Becoming Philosophical, Philosophy, Reality and Values & Knowledge.
The conversation roamed over book reviews and reviewing: the value or otherwise, how people choose books, how you find out about new books, your assumptions about a new novel with no quotes from well-known people on the cover, quotes taken out of context, or from a previous time or about a different book altogether.
Among many lovely examples was Black Spring by Henry Miller with a quote from George Orwell, "Get hold of Black Spring", taken from a far more prosaic sentence, " ... if you can get hold of Black Spring ... ", but not, as far we know, followed by the words, " ... throw it in the river."
But the height of the evening, the most enjoyable and engaging discussion took place about Hazlitt's essay "On the Pleasure of Hating". Written in the early eighteen hundreds, the language is intensely different to our own, however, with a little effort, one gets over that. Interestingly, one group member read the books while on a treadmill at the gym. As a person who has trouble walking in a straight line, I was wildly impressed with the level of co-ordination and concentration required to read and run at the same time. I suppose you don't have to watch for traffic, though, which helps.
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I no longer have my collection of Orwell's essays, so can not for the moment find the exact quotation I alluded to last night, but, while digging around on the internet I came up with this quote from the essay Inside the Whale, which surprised me somewhat (I certainly don't remember it):
"Here in my opinion is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past".
Yes, it is Miller he's talking about, though you might be forgiven for being sceptical. It makes me wonder why the publishers of the paperback of Black Spring - Panther, I think - didn't use this instead of the very selective and misleading one they put on the jacket.
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