Do you feel a present continuity with your youngest memory of self?
Any self-examination of the self is presumably bound to be riven with revisions of self-strategy. Only fiction creation can allow one perhaps to begin to stand outside that process. Even if it’s just a glimpse of that ‘outside-of-self’ world. King’s attempt at this was ‘The Dark Tower’… (my review of the DT)
I shall be discussing Proust later!
Cf: ‘Weirdtongue’
24.9.11: A new book soon to be published:
http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780713998269,00.html
Deceit and Self-Deception
Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others
» Robert Trivers – Allen Lane Hardback : 06 Oct 2011
Concerns also the (mis-?) ‘confidence’ implicit in world economy and politics. The underpinning that the world’s self-deception provides for human being-racism – as a good or bad force?
Individual people necessarily in denial …
And, for me, the Internet itself (and its inhabitants) as the central force that now underpins all these machinations of self, Proustian selves, and survival / natural selection. – again for good or ill?
Books themselves now surviving as non-tree hypertext…but killing the centuries-old treebook version in the process.
I now have a copy of the above book. Below is from the its Preface:
———————–
The time is ripe for a general theory of deceit and self-deception based on evolutionary logic, a theory that in principle applies to all species but with special force to our own. We are thoroughgoing liars, even to ourselves. Our most prized possession – language – not only strengthens our ability to lie but greatly extends its range. We can lie about events distant in space and time, the details and meaning of the behaviour of others, our innermost thoughts and desires and so on. But why, why self-deception? Why do we possess marvelous sense organs to detect information only to distort it after arrival?
[...] It is a dark and opaque side to ourselves, one that we leave untreated at our own peril, but it is also a source of endless humour and amazement, so that we can also enjoy the subject as we suffer it.
For more: http://www.knibbworld.com/campbelldiscuss/messages/1/5209.html?1318691597
On page 125 of the above Trivers book, there is a section headed:
WRITING ABOUT TRAUMA IMPROVES IMMUNE FUNCTION
It is final proof, that writing Horror is a sort of self-deception that assists with your immune functions, and thus your health.