I'm afraid I truly began to object to Jonah Lehrer and to his book "Proust Was a Neuroscientist" even before I got to a word Lehrer wrote. A mind that would choose this quote from Wallace Stevens to be the first line of his book is not a mind for me:
"Reality is a product of the most august imagination." Sounds august itself, that line, doesn't it? It is, like much Stevens's poetry, a dreary commonplace jumped up by the emperor's generalizations to seem like profound wisdom. Not only is it falsely inflated, it is, to most anyone who considers it seriously, false period. We all have heard the commonplace expressed in homlier terms, like, "What one man sees as a glass half empty, another sees as a glass half full." The pessimist and the optimist, addressing the same "facts", will interpret them very differently. The underlying notion is true enough but utterly trite. Do you feel the "reality is" that the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short? I don't. We have different attitudes, energy-levels, "livers" -- thus producing what Stevens calls our imaginations. Where Stevens's cliche merits being called flatly false, is, say, when you step in a hole and break your leg, or get cancer, of your spouse's head is crushed by a falling rock. That rock is, in most people's vocabulary, "real"; it is not the product of anyone's imagination. Beware of anyone who begins a sentence, "Reality isb&" >From his "Prelude" (Oy!), I judge Lehrer an adroit and mellifluous writer whose mind is, as Whitman's was, as romantically drippy and formless as melted chocolate. I have never enjoyed people who revel in their inconsistency -- as Whitman did. Lehrer differs from Whitman: Lehrer does not realize he is inconsistent. The one line from his "Prelude" I hope you will remember as you read on in his book is: "Our science is incomplete, no map of matter will ever explain the IMMATERIALITY of our consciousness." ************** Life should be easier. So should your homepage. Try the NEW AOL.com. (http://www.aol.com/?optin=new-dp&icid=aolcom40vanity& ncid=emlcntaolcom00000002)
