Strange Powers Read Free Page B

believe it is far more than that. It is all part of what might be called 'the new romanticism'. The 'old romanticism' dates back just about two centuries before the occult revival; it may be said to have started with Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise in 1760; and Rousseau's book is basically a plea for freedom: that a man and woman who are in love have a right to become lovers without the approval of society. And all romanticism has continued to be an obsession with freedom: the feeling that freedom can be found if you go and look for it. It runs from Byron's Childe Harold to Hesse's Siddhartha and Jack Kerouac's On the Road . The interesting thing about this new incarnation of the spirit of romanticism is that it came so late. The old romanticism may be said to have died out in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the fin de siècle ; its last avatars were Rimbaud, Verlaine, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and those other poets of what Yeats called 'the tragic generation'. After that, there was a reaction: back to realism, classicism, social responsibility. From the twilight sadness of Verlaine and Dowson, there was a plunge into a savage pessimism of the 1920s—Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Huxley, Joyce. The writers of the thirties rallied, pulling themselves back from the brink; they wrote about dole queues, the war in Spain, social responsibility. Then came the war; and after it, a sense of hiatus. Nobody seemed to know where to go next. The American sociologist David Riesman wrote an essay called 'The Found Generation' about the new generation of students; it seemed that they were no longer full of political idealism, like Riesman's generation of the thirties; all they wanted was a good job, a suburban house and a car.
    When I wrote The Outsider in 1955, it seemed to me that I was swimming in direct opposition to the current of the times. Nobody was interested in Nietzsche and Hesse and Nijinsky. Yet Kerouac's On the Road had, in fact, been written three years earlier and when it finally appeared, in 1957, it was clear that America also had its generation of dissatisfied romantics who thought that freedom lay just around the corner—in San Francisco, or New Mexico, or perhaps in Death Valley, where Charles Manson's 'family' were arrested in 1969. Within ten years, the new romanticism had transformed the face of society in Europe and America; the students were marching and protesting again, and the 'Beatniks' (the name was coined by a San Francisco columnist) outnumbered holiday makers in seaside resorts. Psychedelic drugs and marijuana also played their part in the revolution. In 1953, Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception had advocated the use of mescaline to produce 'expanded consciousness', but it was another ten years before mescaline and LSD became as common as marijuana. An Englishman who settled in America, Alan Watts, became the prophet of this new generation of 'mescaline eaters'; his doctrine asserts basically that western man has become too aggressive towards nature; he must learn to stop 'running', to become passive and receptive. Dr John Lilly's important book The Center of the Cyclone also advocates the controlled use of psychedelic drugs for 'inner exploration', and goes into considerable detail about the techniques for this 'journey to the interior'. Carlos Castaneda's three books about his 'magical apprenticeship' to the Yacqui Indian medicine man, don Juan, have all achieved the status of best sellers; but, on close examination, it is difficult to see why. Walter Goldschmidt, who introduces the first ( The Teachings of Don Juan ) begins by admitting that it is partly allegory, and Castaneda's accounts of his meeting with the peyotl god Mescalito, and of his flight through the air when he rubs himself with a special ointment, sound like exercises in imaginative fiction. Castaneda's books are best-sellers because they express the aspirations of the new romanticism so clearly: the desire to escape to 'other