The Winner of Our Discontent

Half a week gone, finally, a new post. I haven't felt much like blogging of late, rather, I've been spending my late nights on the phone with my fiancée [thanks Zelda for the tip], Viv. So far, I worked from 9:30 AM to 9:00 PM two nights this week. There is, frankly, little time left for much else besides the occasional book. I finished reading Gaiman's Stardust not too short after the last post, Sunday, as well as that Shakespeare book, Shadowplay, a book that took me into previously unexplored (rather profound) historical territory. I think Asquith's book deserves a certain amount of praise for her attempt to challenge the common biases, assumptions, and trifles - one being the (pro-) Protestant bias of our historical perspective. If, in the course of my upcoming Advanced Shakespeare course, we are expected to research a theoretical standpoint, I am willing to stake out the much contested territory surrounding New Historicism - I have read Greenblatt and Asquith. However, I digress.

Today I decided that I am going to read Golding's Pincher Martin next. After googling the title, I discovered an interesting article drawing comparisons between Golding and Bergson, a philosopher I became interested in after reading Kazantzakis about two years ago. It was, however, at this moment I realized I did not own a single book by Bergson. For now I must be content with the brief excerpts from Creative Evolution in an anthology called Art In Theory: 1900-2000, An Anthology of Changing Ideas. What caught my attention in the article, in particular, was Bergson's notion of the inter-relationship between free will and time. The book under question is Bergson's Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Actually, I am looking to obtain a copy, anon.

It is only in seeing consciousness run through matter, lose itself there and find itself there again, divide and reconstitute itself, that we shall form an idea of the mutual opposition of the two terms [intelligence and intuition], as also, perhaps, of their common origin.