I came across an edition of this and have been quite struck. I would like to share at least one enthusiasm before the holidays claim us all.
"[The Prolific and the Devourer] is a book of aphorisms and reflections written in the summer--and abandoned in the autumn--of 1939. It reflects Auden's attitudes in his first months in America, at a moment of transition between his equivocal Marxism in the 1930s and after. One reason he abandoned the book (probably before it was finished) was his discontent with its mandarin style. More important perhaps, was his total renunciation in the first weeks of the Second World War of the optimistic predictions he makes in Part IV about the moral improvement of mankind. At the same time he also renounced the pacifist position he espouses in the book." -- Edward Mendelson
The full text, Parts I-IV, first appeared in Antaeus in 1981 then again from Ecco in 1996. It is out of print in all editions, and I could find information on the paperback only. It looks as though it sold 496 copies and forgot itself (according to Bookscan...well, maybe not that last bit). Still, I recall an independent bookseller saying this week that there is no such thing as a rare book anymore, so if you put your mind to it, or browser to Abebooks.com, I'm sure you can dig this up. I recommend that you do. In order to convince you of this, I've lovingly described the first few passages below. Behold!
To the Devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains:
but it is not so, he only takes portions of existence and fancies
it the whole.
But the Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the
Devourer, as a sea, received the excess of his delights.
These two classes of men are always upon earth, and they
should be enemies: whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to
destroy existence.
William Blake
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Not only does Man create the world in his own image, but the different types of man create different kinds of worlds. Cf. Blake: "A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees."
All the striving of life is a striving to transcend duality, and establish unity or freedom. The Will, the Unconscious, is this desire to be free. Our wants are our conception of what dualities exist, i.e., of what the obstacles are to our will. We are not free to will not to be free.
Freud has led us astray in opposing the Pleasure Principle to the Reality Principle. This is concealed Puritanism. "What I want, the world outside myself cannot give. Therefore what I want is wrong. The Death Wish: Never to have been born is beyond all comparison the best." On the contrary, my wants are just as much part of reality as anything else.
It is untrue to say that we really desire to return to the womb. We picture freedom thus because it was our earliest experience of Unity and we can only picture the unknown future in terms of the known past.
At first the baby sees his limbs as belonging to the outside world. When he has learnt to control them, he accepts them as parts of himself. What we call the "I," in fact, is the area over which our will is immediately operative. Thus, if we have a toothache, we seem to be two people, the suffering "I" and the hostile outer world of the tooth. His penis never fully belongs to a man.
The Dictator who says "My People": the Writer who says " My Public."
People seems "real" to us, i.e., part of our life, in proportion as we are conscious that our respective wills affect each other.
Part of our knowledge of reality comes to us automatically through unavoidable personal contacts. The rest through the use of the intellect.
The intellect, by revealing to us unsuspected relations between facts of which we have no personal and therefore emotional experience and facts of which we have, enables us to feel about and therefore to be affected in our actions by the former. It widens the horizon of the heart.
- MS
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