Topical Guide 889
Mark Dorset
Deception, Hoaxes
Credulity versus Skepticism
Leaving Small’s Hotel, Chapter 6:
Flying saucers were a craze when I was a boy, but I couldn’t make myself believe in them. I tried. I wanted to believe in them. I understood that it would be fun to believe in them. I followed the reports of spottings and tried to swallow them, but it wasn’t easy. The photographs were especially hard to accept. I kept seeing flying hubcaps, pie pans, and Jell-O molds instead of saucers.
Imagination: As Refuge
Leaving Small’s Hotel, Chapter 6:
Dudley would have called himself a realist, and he would have been proud to claim the title, but I think that he was a realist only by default, because he was a person who had come to mistrust and even fear his imagination. He had become one of those people who prefer the examined life to the imagined one, who disparage that alternative world where I live so much of the time, the world in which survivors of prisons and concentration camps dwell while they endure their trials because it is a place where they can keep self-respect alive, and thought, and will, and hope.
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (translated by Sophie Wilkins):
There must be something we can call a sense of possibility. Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not. The consequences of so creative a disposition can be remarkable, and may, regrettably, often make what people admire seem wrong, and what is taboo permissible, or, also, make both a matter of indifference. Such possibilists are said to inhabit a more delicate medium, a hazy medium of mist, fantasy, daydreams, and the subjunctive mood.
Simon Leys, “Balzac’s Genius & Other Paradoxes,” New York Review of Books, January 12, 1995:
Another central experience of Balzac’s childhood was his exile to a Spartan boarding school at the tender age of eight. The brutalities of boarding school can routinely maim sensitive children for life; occasionally they may also breed a genius. Numbed by sorrow and fear, the child Balzac fell into a stupor; his teachers, unable to draw any intelligent response out of their lethargic pupil, bombarded him with punishments. Detention meant being locked for hours or even days on end in a tiny cell, and the little boy ended up spending up to four days a week in the solitary gloom of the school prison. To escape from this desolation, mere dreaming was not enough: he had to invent for himself another world, more real than this unbearable environment. Relying on his memory, he began to re-create in his mind scenes he had read about in books; he developed a visionary imagination that enabled him to conjure entire worlds with near hallucinatory power.
Performance
Here is Kraft’s reading of the episode from Chipps & Company’s 1999 series of readings from Leaving Small’s Hotel for LTV Studios:
See also:
Deception TG 91, TG 482; Information, Misinformation, Disinformation TG 585
Imagination TG 62; Imagination, Improvisation TG 102; Imagination TG 113, TG 713, TG 862, TG 865
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