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The World as Work of Art
The following is excerpted from 2012 Revisited, a new book available on Amazon. Pick up a copy here.
When I think about the catastrophe roaring toward us, for some reason I keep recalling a passage from Virginia Woolf, one of my favorite writers, in a memoir published after her death. Woolf found most of life to be forgettable, “cotton wool.” But the cotton wool is punctuated by moments of intensity. She believed, “behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth of about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare; there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.” I share this intuitive faith — it is unshakeable; I find my own life reveals it to be the case.
Woolf had a mystical intuition that the intense moments of her life were preserved in some way. There would be a future opportunity to review, reenter, them, in some kind of after-life. At times I have the similar sense — and psychedelic experience certainly intensifies this — that my life exists as a kind of hyper-object, already complete, already written in some kind of spectral storybook, and I live through the reenactment. By saying this, I…
