I'm always behindhand reading my copies of the London Review of Books, which arrive fortnightly (though it seems more often than that), and yesterday, still on Vol.33 no.22 from last November 17th, I reached Jenny Diski's review of a book called The Myth and Mystery of UFOs by Thomas Bullard. Her review began with this admirable argument:
“The problem with that ‘blue sky thinking’ we were introduced to by New Labour is that we happen to perceive the sky as blue only because of our particular physiology and arrangement of senses on this particular planet. ‘Blue sky thinking’ doesn't so much encourage limitless imagination as embed in its own metaphor our absolute inability to think outside our perceptual and conceptual limitations.”
Exactly. (The comparable metaphor that dooms itself is ‘pushing the envelope’. Intended to mean to bravely go where people usually haven't, what could sound more timorous than fiddling with stationery?)
The literary figure who famously points out that the sky isn't really blue is Paul Bowles, explaining his novel title The Sheltering Sky by saying that it's a kindness that the sky shows itself to us as blue rather than as the cold black void it really is. Of course to say so is to emphasise the void, and this was Bowles' speciality. Here's a typical, endearingly gloomy quotation from him:
The literary figure who famously points out that the sky isn't really blue is Paul Bowles, explaining his novel title The Sheltering Sky by saying that it's a kindness that the sky shows itself to us as blue rather than as the cold black void it really is. Of course to say so is to emphasise the void, and this was Bowles' speciality. Here's a typical, endearingly gloomy quotation from him:
“Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems...limitless.”
Bowles himself, a composer as well as writer and translator, survived to the age of 88. He died of heart failure in Morocco, where he had lived and held expatriate court for 52 years, in 1999.
