Talking with Phil the better part of the last couple of hours...

We talked about all my late blog topics, going much further than I usually get into the relationship among Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse and Romain Rolland, and me at last explaining in detail the wrongness that I find in Mann's understanding of music (Vs. Hesse's rightness), and the similarity (of  insincere, formulaïc heterosexuality) that I find between Mann and Gide which, for me, makes them both similarly insufferably tedious and unreadable.  So much to explain, but Phil understands me--even when I say that Hesse's Steppenwolf, at bottom, is written from an irreducibly heterosexual/heteronormative viewpoint which, while decently tolerant, cannot really even conceive of homoeroticism (much less of father/son incest--Truly there was no one in Thomas Mann's universe who understood him).   Dark and long-lasting indeed was the night that descended on us with the Oath of Theodosius!

Think, but for one example, of Gregory of Tours' strange, dwarfish notion of what a human being is--It's there, implicit in his History of the Franks, like something seen from the wrong end of a telescope. Or think, if you will, of the curious bi-pedal, caste-bound talking creatures described in the funny little operetta of Aucassin et Nicolette--There's not a great deal of difference between them and the fools so genially described by Erasmus in his Praise of Folly. With Leibniz, Descartes and Hobbes and Locke, it seems like something is stirring; something that maybe with Shakespeare, Congreve, Goethe and Voltaire is coming awake.  But when we have arrived at Darwin and the Viennese "Depth Psychologists," yet again, we seem half asleep, strangers to ourselves. Only lately, maybe, with the Internet and "gay marriage," do we even approach to understanding ourselves, or to being aware of how much about ourselves there is yet to know.