![]() The spiritual transitions which flash by, which are enacted between the striking of a match and the puffing of that ubiquitous pipe, do not seem as blank and unreal as they do because the structural outlines are left on the horizon, the emotional materials having burned or wasted away. ![]() There is no recognizable economy of narration which explains the effect produced by the Autobiography. One is several times confronted with a summary or dismissive account of central, professedly transforming, occurrences in his life, which cannot, surely, represent things as they were then lived, yet at the same time is not just the misleading product of a distant or oblique style of recollection. It is not just the speed of travel that leaves one gasping, but the glancing view of some episodes that Russell puts in. It is not altogether a book, bringing together a rather random collection of letters with a sketchy account of the author’s life which, though sometimes alarmingly frank, omits much and hurries the reader on from one cursorily described event to another. ![]() Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography (which was published in three volumes in the 1960s) is a work that leaves one in more than one way winded. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |