Less than two weeks 'til my James Society Prez Address in DC, where I'm supposed to find "delight in dark times"-a topic more daunting now than I could have imagined back in September when I proposed it. Looking for one last ray to lead us from the cave, I turn again to the always-reliably-illuminating Bob Richardson.
WJ famously decried the inadequacy of words to capture the brilliant immediacy of experience. But it's finally his fluently original way with them that consistently delivers delight. The gaslighting authoritarian apologists and bullies who've presently hijacked our institutions can't take that away. Kipling was right, words are our most powerful drug. Better even than nitrous.
"He was the first to use “hegelism,” “time-line,” and “pluralism.” He had a gift for phrases that stick in the mind: “the bitch-goddess success,” “stream of consciousness,” “one great blooming, buzzing confusion,” “the moral equivalent of war,” “healthy-minded,” and “live option.” He used examples, anecdotes, jokes, anything to impart narrative dash and energy to the page. And there are many places where, standing on the arid plain of experimental data, James turns to face the reader, reaching outward through his own experience to us, in prose that can stand comparison to anyone’s."
--"William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism" by Robert D. Richardson: https://a.co/gVAcr6V
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