CREATIVE EXTREMES
James had loved her passionately as a youth, when they had worked in thesame office for a time, but only from a distance, because her love had beenbestowed on someone else, a fellow-worker who was either quicker off theromantic mark or just less inhibited than himself. He suffered hisunrequited love for her throughout the years following her departure fromthe firm, and when he also departed to become an apprentice author, his lifehad grown accustomed to solitary nights and friendless days. Being alonein his lodgings was no great burden on him. On the contrary, it was alogical step from his previous loneliness.And so he wrote for years, throughout the greater part of eachweekday, until the number of typescripts – writing first, typing later – piled
up in his room, and his notebooks, in which the works were drafted, grewto fill a large drawer. He considered himself, above all else, a philosopher,
a seeker after the Truth, a pioneer of new insights into life and the world.He was too serious-minded to be content with fiction, his solitude andunrequited love not having conditioned him to become an artist in the usualobjective sense. He was resigned to philosophy, even when he realized thatit was the most intellectually-demanding mode of writing and the leastcommercially viable. Better to be a philosopher, he thought, than to haveremained a clerk. Besides, I’m no ordinary philosopher. More arevolutionary pseudo-philosopher than a traditional type…. Not that hediscovered this fact all at once, but only when the time was ripe. A pseudo-philosopher was somehow superior to a genuine, or academic, philosopher,more a man of essence than of appearance, a metaphysician as opposed to aphysicist, an original writer rather than ‘a chair’. In similar vein, a pseudo-
state was somehow superior to a genuine state, a matter of the people ratherthan either the land or country considered from a nationalist point of view.Pseudo-democracy could likewise be considered superior to genuinedemocracy, giving maximum representation to the electorate – a qualitativeabsolutism.Yes, James Riley realized all this and so much else as, year after year,he scribbled the time away in his single room and noted the progress of hiswork from a bourgeois relative stage to an early petty-bourgeois relativelyabsolute stage, and even, in due course, to a late petty-bourgeois absolutestage of creative and ideological integrity. If he had begun as a philosopher
or, more correctly, a philosophical novelist and essayist, he had progressedquite some way beyond that point by the time he came to evaluate theideological/creative status of his various stages of philosophical endeavour. Read the rest of this entry »