Abstraction

[tealin]

There are very few people in the world to whose work I will give my time and attention without question: I will see anything directed by Edgar Wright, for example, or written by Terry Pratchett.* I will also give the benefit of the doubt to any member of the League of Gentlemen, so when I saw a show listed on Radio 4 in which Jeremy Dyson talks about one of his favourite writers, I listened, and am glad I did!

The Unsettled Dust: The Strange Stories of Robert Aickman

I am pleased to report my faith in them is still secure. It was cemented by the closing few minutes of the show, which introduced me to this brilliant paragraph:

I believe that at the time of the Industrial and French revolutions (I am not commenting upon the American one!), mankind took a wrong turning. The beliefs that one day, by application of reason and the scientific method, everything will be known, and every problem and unhappiness solved, seem to me to have led to a situation where, first, we are in danger of destroying the whole world, either with a loud report or by insatiable overconsumption and overbreeding, and where, second, everyone suffers from an existentialist angst, previously confined to the very few. There is a fundamental difference between worrying where one's next meal is coming from and worrying about the quality and reality of one's basic being. The great prophetic work of the modern world is Goethe's Faust... Mephistopheles offers Faust unlimited knowledge and unlimited power in exchange for his soul. Modern man has accepted that bargain.
    ... Spirit is indefinable, as everything that matters is indefinable, but one can tell the person who has it from the person who has it not.

Robert Aickman, 1976

... Of course, it might have been helped by the fact that a streamlined version of it was read by Mark Gatiss, which is possibly the best introduction to any profound concluding paragraph.

*I haven't read Snuff yet, but that's more a matter of time than taste.