Saturday, May 17, 2014

Hardly Magickal

Spent some of the day, though not too much, thinking about magick and the occult and such like, since I was preparing for a lecture on Yeats and the subject couldn't really be avoided. Did the great man really take it seriously or was it all some hyper-sophisticated spoof? I suppose the stuff with his missus and the automatic writing must have helped pass the long nights in wintry Dublin.

But it occurs to me that I had quite an interest in all this nonsense for a few years in my teens - at least to the point when I went to university. Colin Wilson's tome The Occult was a big read for me, and I suppose it was quite an interesting book. My old paperback edition disappeared on the great migration overseas. I hope someone else got to enjoy it.

My guess is that my fascination over this stuff grew out of a sense of boredom with the mundane in my callow years in Manchester and once I discovered just about everything in life was interesting it just melted away.

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