Whether subconscious intention, a phenomenon like Colin Wilson’s factor X, or pure coincidence, recent reading has traced a loose constellation of oneiric elements and what might be called a retrieval of the archaic. The pattern may be illusory.
Mircea Cărtărescu’s taste for the extravagant aligns with recent discussion on the Weird Studies podcast, centred on Wilson’s The Occult, a study of esotericism in Western thought. Wilson’s description of the occult as a kind of ether or energy that underlies experience suggests an affinity, albeit oblique, with Hans Blumenberg’s conception of metaphysics.
The Laughter of the Thracian Maid contains a line of enquiry into myth, detachment, and the difficulty of first things. The afterword by Spencer Hawkins offers this: “Blumenberg’s work remains, in many regards, a reflection on reclusion: a highly documented account of a life spent apart from the world, suspicious of common understandings, and in pursuit of his lessons of solitude.”
A passage stands apart:
“The study of Being must constantly detach itself, particularly from everything that has already been there before. That also goes for the historical distance in which Thales belongs: the pre-Socratics, to the surprise of those who considered them to represent starting points, as well attested by written transmission, prove to be a mere afterglow of what came before them. The mythology painstakingly reworked by them, perhaps more concealed than overcome, is also just such a sunset view of something withdrawing itself irrecoverably from us. And withdrawing mercifully, because we would simply not be up for its concealment, as has always been the case with whatever yields the highest privilege to the survivor capable of documenting what he may only perceive fading behind him.”
The word mere recalls the mere breath of Job’s interlocutors: devoid of substance.