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Findings consists
of 4 main sections - 'The Psyche', 'History', 'Culture, Literature and The
Arts' and 'Religion'; sandwiched between 5 shorter sections of epigrams,
entitled 'Pour l'Agniappe', 'Tweeners' (3 sections of these) and
'Enders'. If it had an Index, it
would include among many other headings Ashberry, Behaviourism, computer
literacy, Dachau, Dante, Eliot, Empiricism, Germans, the Greeks, incest,
Jesus, Judaism, marriage, Pascal, Postmodernism, Pound, Realpolitik,
Romanticism, Shakespeare, Totalitarianism, Wagner and Violence.
Here's a taster:
The
fundamental contradiction that science poses to religion does not
lie in its
refutation, express or implied, of the specific assertions of religion,
or even in
the extent to which it predisposes the practitioners of science or
those
influenced by them, their method or achievements to an attitude of
rejection or
skepticism with regard to all assertions of the former class, but
in the
overwhelming mass of evidence testifying with a finality and precision
never before
dreamed of to the transience, causality, and relativity of every
manifestation
of being within a matrix of time and space of unimaginable
dimensions. (p.49)
That's a single sentence huffily, puffily, pedantically asserting (I think)
that scientific insights into space, time and causality are incompatible with
religon. And I can see that some scientific insights pose particular
challenges to certain aspects of certain religions, but a challenge is not
the same as a fundamental contradiction. Hasn't Buddhism for example always
acknowledged 'a matrix of time and space of unimaginable dimensions'? Doesn't
Greene's sentence beg so many questions, for all its fussy chop-logic, that
it's virtually meaningless?
It would be a tedious and lengthy process to go through this book picking up
every instance of verbosity and arguing with every dubious assertion. The problem is not with this or any
specific argument, but that Greene is a writer who fundamentally disrespects
language. Just occasionally the effect is hilarious, like Polonius on speed,
but more often it's profoundly depressing. On page one, for example, he offers the following
'epigram'
A summit,
after all, is nothing but a small plateau.
Er, no. A summit is a summit, and a plateau a plateau. The words denote
precisely different things, in a particular relation to one another. You
might as usefully say that 'a semi-quaver is nothing, after all, but a small
minim'. Or 'a sock is nothing, after all, but a tight hat'. You wouldn't
expect a writer who pointedly handles language with this degree of po-faced
hubris to have anything particularly insightful to say about poetry,
postmodernist or otherwise, and Greene doesn't.
In fact Findings doesn't have
an index to help you locate Greene's ruminations on Eliot or Ashberry. Which
is fair enough in its way, because the declared purpose of the book isn't to
inform or entertain or move or even to persuade, but (as it says on the
dust-jacket) to 'mark the boundaries of the author's mind, i.e. include what
he thinks most deeply about - plus a few things he never thought about at all
until they popped into his head and this book'.
Ah, silly me... Now I get it: it's all about J.P himself, wetting the
lamp-posts of his personal intellectual territory. So that OK then, I'll just
take it on trust that the dogged polymath is actually thinking very deeply as
he trots between.
© Jane Seal 2008
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