[ilds] An Invitation to a repeat of the past?

[Bruce Redwine]

Dr. D.,

I'm inclined to agree with you, but I don't know how to approach the subject.  My training is not in this type of literary analysis.  Without a doubt Durrell thought of himself as a religious writer -- but one of a special sort.  I sense, however, that there is indeed something behind his words -- baffling as they often are -- which suggests something numinous and which some people are particularly receptive to.  David Holdsworth today told the story of how he gave Justine to his dentist, who is not an impressionable youth, who had never read Durrell before, and who was immediately enraptured by the novel's first words.  It's that kind of special power in Durrell's writings that suggests to me that he had spiritual gifts, which we readers usually call the "magic" of his style but which may indicate something more profound.


Bruce


-----Original Message-----
>From: durrell at bigpond.com
>Sent: May 22, 2008 3:31 PM
>To: ilds at lists.uvic.ca, Bruce Redwine <bredwine1968 at earthlink.net>
>Subject: Re:An Invitation to a repeat of the past?
>
>Bruce.....thanks once again for recognising the true essence of LD's literary mission and my empathy towards his heraldic perspective and spiritual quest....he is a literary bodhisattva....i sense a shift in your engagement with LD towards an insight with which I contentedly concur....that is one can view the outpouring of his creative works as an expressive externalised reaction to his spiritual revelations....thus in a sense i propose that his works are more accurately viewed as epiphenomenonal rather than cognitively constructed and yet they remain strongly transformational within the cognitive sets of his loyal disciples.....nevertheless i maintain that if one can absorb the works of LD with an intuitional openess of his primary heraldic drive then his creativity can be intimately consumed and savoured rather than merely tongue tasted....