January 15th, 2008

I have, tonight, finished my British Literature course—that is, the one required ... not that I do not have other personal research.

Well, it was interesting. It began with Bede and Beowulf, skipped lightly over the ballad tradition, and followed the twisting thread of poetry and prose up to modern times.

Yet as I neared the Eighteenth Century, I discovered a curious thing. The very books I had never been able to finish as a child (such as Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe) were authored by men who were satirists. Gulliver's Travels is heavily edited for children—but I had even then felt its withering sarcasm, something—a taste I liked not then, nor now. It is said that Robinson Crusoe, and Gulliver's Travels, succeeded because they fit the mindset of the times. But those times have faded into these; and the authors' sly touch of satire shows the clearer now to me.

So why, you may ask-why dislike those books? I was then quite ravenous. Any book within sight or hand grasp was devoured. Nine years old is a hard age, when you have a liking for adventure, and it is hard to do your schoolwork!

But I did not know my reasons! Still, I recoiled from the slippery touch of Eighteenth Century thought ...

Which is, possibly, why I am writing a book now.

Follow up:

Put it this way, Robinson Crusoe was a thorough Eighteenth Century Englishman. He could hardly feel; he could hardly be called either brave or bold. He acquires a native friend; the other fellow is "savage", and condescendingly looked upon. Robinson Crusoe has no imagination. And neither wisdom nor courage is found to redeem the book; only a flood of irritating detail, like an oily stream for drowning in.

Perhaps the book had a fine conclusion! But a book which by turns slaps you and bores you deserves no full reading ...

And, being an impatient nine years, I gave it justice.

Gulliver's Travels, though I hardly finished it, rather jabs at society from the outside. Gulliver himself is entirely harmless; he is the problem society finds itself burdened with. The satirized problem society has is that it chooses expedient means over good ones. Gulliver is too big, the Lilliputians (tiny people) are scared; they drug him; they chain him in a temple; they gradually give him some freedom ... and they send him against their enemies, and THEN want their enemies subdued and annexed. So in a word what I recall of it is boiling (at least to me now) satire upon injustices and greed etc. At the time it mainly impressed me as repulsive.

This mindset—this was the mindset which crumbled to despair before Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century. To help the public mind along further, Lyell and Darwin declared what everyone had been coming around to ... God did not, and could not, exist! Or at the least, there was no proof—and that was all the Nineteenth Century needed to plunge into increasing gloom.

This was unarguable for the Church. The Church was flabbergasted. The Church blurted follies.

Perhaps—they said—God had ASSISTED evolution! Perhaps-perhaps! Perhaps unfortunate Genesis spoke in Figurative Terms; such as, the generations between Adam and Abraham were much longer as obviously Biblical Styles Back Then assuredly used a few names as representations of entire centuries and anyway you know about how they wrote Back Then and you can be assured that Genesis never asked to be taken at face value and ... !!!

They were wrong then.

Poor Darwin lived before Genes were discovered. If you are to compare human DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) with DNA of any other living organism, or any living organism with a different family, you shall find it entirely different. Every cell in the human body has the exact same DNA as any other-your skin cell for example, and your heart cell. It is so vast a tome of orders and instructions that cells only use certain portions of it, ignoring most-which the other cells use. So any cell in you contains all the details needed to make a body.

There are literally organs within cells. Too small to be called organs; yet they serve the purpose of keeping the cell alive and functioning. The very level of complexity and perfectness in the "lowest cell" is splendid.

If Darwin had known how unscientific he was, he might have spared us a Politically Correct—a very Officially Accurate—botheration. Generations and decades of poor cowed scientists should never have had to desperately hunt out Evidences of Evolution. They should never have had to fall to the whopping indignity of illustrating ape-men to slack-jawed audiences from a single donkey tooth, to be specific.

Or to be unspecific, we should not have kids being bored out of their wits in History and Science class with details of fictitious cave-men and ape brutes and how the Paleoliths proceeded to pick their large and bony teeth ...

It might be an easier world, I say, for scientists; but they are now desperately expected to prop the Theory for all mankind's admiring glance.

Poor fellows, but I pity them. What pressure—what tooth grinding!

But that is not my job; I will not, for my life, lie about the past.

When the Church allies itself with the Current Wisdom, there have we a problem. For the Current Wisdom is an ever-changing stream, rushing first in its course and then run dry, hurtling trash and filth like a wheel of whirling. Its oily depth besmears any unlucky enough to take a dip.

Indeed, we are all quite greasy from it. Many of us come to Church to have Soap expounded to us, for the pastor must always know the how-to-wherefores of Slime-Cutting; it is a fine irony, but the Soap slips from our grasp on account of our slick fingers. We've slabs and heaps of the stuff, but it sits in our cupboards while we take our daily showers in filthy water.

There is, however ... let me insist, a slight discomfort arising from this strange Greasiness. When we can stand the oozing sores of infection no longer, we take home obvious cures, such as Lotion-to-put-on-the-pus, and Oils-of-aromatic and Lovely-healing.

Still, we might do better to switch the water off with a determined hand—to bust the bright screen in. The spring is sparkling.

So here you have it! I do not give tripe for what "scholars" term Pre-History, because there never was any such thing as un-history before modern times (except for Eighteen-hundreds myths), and I will do my best to let people know what their ancestors lived like.

For the entire notion of the Stone Age is riddled with error. It was invented to fit the Evolutionary Theory, and they both could use bolstering. Obviously, if you start out with nothing and get to everything in general, you must have people eventually turn from fish to land beasts and then to apes and then to brutes and then to us. And therefore, you will have a Stone Age, followed by a Copper Age, followed by a Bronze one, and then we are smack in the middle of the Romans and the Celts fighting bloody battles.

And being more inclined to the bloody-battles type of history, I have made it my quest to write some books—fiction books—to give you a crystal glimmer of what our ancestor thought THEIR ancestors lived like together with what they actually did live like. To weave the legends ... full of adventure and suspense ... and, with God's help, I will succeed.