Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  I have written here before about Henry James' novel, THE SACRED FOUNT.  Today I'll discuss one detail in it.   James offers up a protracted discussion between two characters, each speaking in oddly cryptic fashion, in which they seem to end up stumbling accidentally into a Platonic metaphor -- indeed THE Platonic metaphor, of wisdom as an escape from the darkness of a cave.  The unnamed first-person narrator is talking here to Ford Obert.  They had first run into each other at the train station at the start of this weekend gathering. Obert is sometimes called "Obert RA," signifying in British usage that he is a member of the Royal Academy.  Near the end of the book, Obert has caught up again with narrator to say that he has been thinking about the question they had discussed earlier (to wit, the way the life force can seemingly flow from one member of a couple to another, enervating one and energizing the other). He has found it illuminating.  I...

Let us return to Henry James and to a work of his I have mentioned and quoted earlier in this blog, The Sacred Fount.   At a certain point the lead character, the first-person pronoun protagonist, starts to doubt that all his ratiocinations about the relationships of the other people in his social circle have a firm hold on reality.  This is how he expresses that doubt to himself.  "I could toss the ball myself. I could catch it and send it back, and familiarity had now made this exercise -- in my own inner precincts --easy and safe. But the mere brush of Lady John's clumsier curiosity made me tremble for the impurity of my creation.  If there had been, so to speak, a discernment, however feeble, of my discernment, it would have been irresistible to me to take this as the menace of some incalculable catastrophe or some public ugliness."    

I invoked one novel of Henry James (1843 - 1916) in my "golden age" list a few weeks back. It was THE SACRED FOUNT. Here is some Wikipedia-type stuff about it.  The novel was published in 1901. It was his 16th novel. By length it might almost be considered a novella.  THE SACRED FOUNT was a departure for James, for several reasons, starting with the first person narration.  Something he never had used before and never would again.  There is also the pagination. All Roman numerals, from beginning to end.  One is accustomed to Roman numbers in a preface and then Arabic numerals for the volume proper.  But in this case, the Romans only end when the book does (at page cxcii). The mental energy required to translate that into 192 is a small thing, but not nothing and presumably contributes to a desired effect.  The plot? As far as outward events go, the plot is simply this.  Our unnamed narrator, a man, takes a train to a party, apparently held on a la...