I felt that my article gave a decent summary of my thesis, so I thought that it would be good to post it here also:

Last year, I completed my PhD thesis, which I titled: “Living Books”: Reading Intimately with Emma Goldman, John Cowper Powys, and Margaret Anderson. With it, I hope to contribute to our understanding of how Powys’s works might be situated within literary modernism and particularly within the US avant-garde milieu which championed his lectures. I was lucky to have two excellent supervisors, Prof. Sara Crangle and Dr. Helen Tyson, and with their support I managed to pass with no corrections.

My title requires some explanation: “Living Books” is a phrase Henry Miller uses to describe Powys in The Books in My Life (1955), and it forms something of a conceptual core to my argument. Miller points out the “living” quality we sometimes experience when reading, that sense of authorial presence which, in Powys’s case, also provides an impression of continuity with his spectacular lectures. In trying to make sense not only of my own reading of Powys and what I found so magnetic about his novels but also his place within the broader scheme of literary modernism, this idea of the “living book” really resonated with me. The phrase brings to mind Powys’s own description of reading as the “resurrection of rebellious, reactionary, fantastical, and wicked spirits” in The Pleasures of Literature (1938), or of “intimate and intense reading as a kind of secret dialogue between the writer and one’s own soul,” as he puts it in The Meaning of Culture (1928). His own prose is saturated with his vivid personality in a manner which reminds us that when we read we are in fact confronting perspectives as real as our own, and which therefore also have the potential to become once again vital.

Powys shares this strongly personal and oracular register with the anarchist feminist Emma Goldman (1869-1940), who in her first book, Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), describes writing as possessing an “intimacy” which the spoken word lacks. With this statement, Goldman (who, incidentally, was also a very popular lecturer in the US contemporary with Powys) inverts the common assumption of the spoken word as being somehow more authentic than writing, a believe which can be traced back to Plato’s Phaedrus, but is also a remarkable thing for an orator to write at the height of their popularity. Goldman adds, albeit somewhat cryptically, that “books are only what we want them to be; rather, what we read into them. That we can do so demonstrates the importance of written as against oral expression.”

Miller in fact refers to Goldman as another of his “Living Books,” that is, besides Powys. Subsequently, the thesis became shaped around my attempt to understand how this sense of authorial intimacy relates to the strongly personal and oracular registers Powys and Goldman use in their writing, and to speculate what effect this might have on readers.

I locate this textual dynamic within the context of the US avant-garde and its cross-fertilisation of art and radical politics, particularly as it unfolds in the pages of The Little Review. Whilst this journal is perhaps more well-known as a hub of international high modernism (and for the Ulysses trial, for which Powys came to its defence), Powys and Goldman provided enormous inspiration for its earlier editions, with Anderson even referring to the former as the “godfather” of her magazine.

I draw on recent anarchist scholarship, asking to what ends might such a readerly intimacy be applied, as well as how it compares with high modernist ways of reading. Whilst many might be aware of Powys’s fruitful correspondence with Goldman during the Spanish Civil War, I hope that my study shows that there is a broader aesthetic terrain which unites the two at an earlier point in their lives, and had a sizeable impact on the journal which helped to introduce literary modernism to the US.

I also draw on much of the rich scholarship which has appeared in The Powys Journal and The Powys Review, which along with the Newsletter have provided a continuing source of insight and inspiration. I joined The Powys Society about five years ago, and have attended three conferences. I only wish I had joined sooner; I have been made to feel incredibly welcome in the Society and have made good friends. The thought-provoking discussions I have had with the fellow Powysians have fed into my work and helped to sharpen my arguments. I look forward to attending many more conferences and to keeping these conversations going!

You can find out more about The Powys Society here:

https://powys-society.org/

1.

I tend to cultivate my own loneliness. Having time alone is vital for me. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the company of others, but I enjoy it in proportion. What really energises and inspires me is solitude, where I can orchestrate my thoughts, sift through my feelings, be alone with the universe so I can figure things out and, ultimately, recreate myself.

For some people (maybe many, maybe most), these things happen in the midst of socialising. “No person is an island.” You figure out who you are in concert with others. Your character forms through action. You attune yourself to society and become, implicitly, a better person. I think all of this is true because we are, in essence, social creatures.

Yet, I also think that we tend to bottle-up this essence into neat formulas and prescriptions. After so many years of hollow ideological individualism wreaking havoc on ostensibly every corner of public and private life, from the enclosure of third spaces to the unbridled hedonism of personally-tailored algorithms, the need which is sorely felt now is to call for community-building and collective spirit. “Loner” is an increasingly embarrassing label, associated with weirdo reactionaries. To be a loner is to be maladjusted, poorly socialised, and a bit weird.

All this could be true, but I believe that for a certain subset of the population preferring one’s own company is simply a fact of life. Whatever reasons there might be for this preference, it can be difficult to truly accept it. There’s always the lurking feeling that wanting time to yourself is either selfish or a sign of personal failure. So much of adulthood is about giving yourself to others – whether that be through work, family, relationships, friendships, or causes – that wanting time to yourself can feel like an indulgence or even a luxury not all can afford.

Whatever the zeitgeist is, we must take a step back to take a broader view of our shared humanity. And solitude has always been a part of our collective story. For example, recently, I have been reading David Bentley Hart’s The Story of Christianity (2007), which describes the “desert fathers,” Christians who would wander out into the desert and live as hermits. One might assume that this extreme ascetism, severing oneself from worldly matters, would be difficult. But I wonder if, perhaps, these pondering souls were simply introverts who derived immense pleasure from their loneliness.

In reacting to individualism, it is important not to exclude individuality. There is a crucial distinction here. Individualism is an ideology, one which is rooted in the idea of private property and competition. Individuality, however, is a spiritual state of the inner person, a frame which considers how our contact with the world is shaped by the uniqueness of our perceptions. Emma Goldman, someone who supported the extremely socialistic ideology of anarcho-communism, upheld this distinction between the two:

Individuality is not to be confused with the various ideas and concepts of Individualism; much less with that “rugged individualism” which is only a masked attempt to repress and defeat the individual and his individuality. So-called Individualism is the social and economic laissez-faire: the exploitation of the masses by the classes by means of legal trickery, spiritual debasement and systematic indoctrination of the servile spirit, which process is known as “education.” That corrupt and perverse “individualism” is the strait-jacket of individuality. It has converted life into a degrading race for externals, for possession, for social prestige and supremacy.1

Where individualism functions through a framework tailored to the benefit of a few individuals, true individuality is about recognising the sheer diversity of individuals out there, and refusing to partake in systems which suppress or curtail these innate differences. By recognising these differences in ourselves – what we find personally meaningful, what we enjoy, how we like to spend our time – we necessarily recognise that others also possess this capacity for uniqueness in equal measure. Goldman writes elsewhere that the “individual soul […] is the true soul that sees and creates the truth alive, out of which is to come a still greater truth, the re-born social soul.”2

2.

There is a unique kind of happiness I feel when I am alone. Those moments when I have solitude like an expanse to dwell on, like a broad rolling plain beneath a changing sky which can become a screen for my thoughts. Here, I can gather myself together or unravel at will, transmute bittersweet brooding into worldly acceptance, step from world to other-world, and kindle all manner of possibility.

Sometimes I need loneliness to process things. Day to day existence is often comprised of reactions rather than actions, of unwelcome circumstance and anxious guesswork. Time alone is therefore time to recover. But I also enjoy luxuriating in this loneliness and drawing on it as a source of creativity. Cultivating the right space, “nesting,” with music, books, drinks and snacks close to hand, allowing all stresses to smooth out and my mind to wander at ease.

Then, a stream of images and associations appear, which I can gaze at in peace from the banks of my solitude. The images can morph and merge, or they can get caught as I observe them closely. Sometimes they are the same, sometimes they are different. Things can shed their everyday associations and take on new meanings, and the mundane can become magical.

Sometimes I wonder, if only I could trace this stream back to its source, like Olivero in Herbert Read’s surrealist novella The Green Child, perhaps there is a “truer” reality there. But the stream’s real magic lies in its unending mystery. I am forever downstream of something I cannot know, and in that fact there is perpetual awe and wonder and fear and beauty and strangeness and sadness and joy.

I recently came across this line from Benjamin De Casseres which I think captures this feeling: “If in sleep we forget our waking lives, may we not in our waking lives forget a far more wonderful life we live in our sleep?”3 De Casseres reiterates a speculation made earlier by Chuang Tzu in his famous “butterfly dream”:

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt that I was a butterfly, flitting around and enjoying myself. I had no idea I was Chuang Tzu. Then suddenly I woke up and was Chuang Tzu again. But I could not tell, had I been Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I was now Chuang Tzu? However, there must be some sort of difference between Chuang Tzu and a butterfly! We call this the transformation of things.4

Chuang Tzu’s whimsical tale touches on the profound mystery of existence. What if the world apparent to our senses is not truly real? I like to think of the butterfly dream as a democratic alternative to Plato’s cave allegory. For Plato, that arch-authoritarian, our sense perceptions are mere shadows of a truer reality which philosophy is tasked with discovering.

I think Chuang Tzu’s butterfly points towards a much more libertarian way of understanding not only our sense perceptions but our idle fantasies. Where Plato posits a “lower” reality in the cave and the “higher” reality – wherein one might journey from ignorance to enlightenment, for Chuang Tzu neither the waking life nor the dream can lay claim to ontological priority. There is simply a given “reality” – at one time that of the sage, at another that of the butterfly.

The butterfly dream frustrates our attempts to think in terms of surface and depth, of false appearances and deeper, meaningful truths. Each appearance, as such, does not conceal but expresses a truth. The dream therefore grants a wonderful freedom to our idle musings, which are as much a part of our life as are our sense perceptions. And we each dream our own dream.

In solitude, we can therefore occupy each fantasy as if it were a reality. We can, for a moment, treat it as a weighty and serious matter. We can roam around it, dwell within it, and then, like a bubble rising to the surface, let it go. Indeed, this playful process is like another life within our life, because we too treat our everyday lives with seriousness, and one day must let go completely.

Perhaps it is this grim fate awaiting us all that gives the term “as if” its power. It is the only way we can “get outside of ourselves,” enter into the lives of butterflies and, ultimately, other people. We naturally empathise with others, but we can also imagine life from the perspective of another, inhabit what we feel to be their thoughts and feelings. It is ever and only a bubble, which can burst as soon as we are confronted with the sublime otherness of that person, who in fact forever eludes our personally-conceived imaginings. But, at the same time, the imagination is the only gateway we really have to another, even when they are close by.

3.

To return to the idea of “individuality” (a “spiritual state of the inner person”), I believe it is this very capacity to enter into other lives, brought so neatly into focus by the practise of solitude, that grants us the freedom to be ourselves.

Being alone is a spaciousness where the imagination can wander. Hopping from image to image, perspective to perspective, we inadvertently notice the gap it leaves each time, the strange absent middle which is at the same time a superabundance.

We all possess this ability to shape-shift. As Pico Della Mirandola writes in his Oration on the Dignity of Man (1496): “Who then will not look with awe upon this our chameleon […]?” We all have the chameleon-like ability to change ourselves at will – the only thing we need possess is nothing. In solitude, when we are detached from all things, the mind can begin to work its wonders. By letting go we gain more.

I will end with a quotation from John Cowper Powys’s A Philosophy of Solitude (1933):

Thus for the isolated self there wells up from the depths of the universe a mysterious humility, more natural than the humility of the crowd. The humility of the crowd in boisterous, unctuous, self-righteous. But the soul that has re-created itself in isolation has gained something of the humility of the grass, the rocks, the winds. All that lives is holy unto it; and it realizes, taught by the innumerable voices of Nature, a certain ultimate equality in everything that draws breath.5

Works cited:

Goldman, E. (1998) ‘The Individual, Society, and the State’ from Goldman, E. and Shulman, A. K. (ed.) Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, Amherst: Humanity Books. [Also available to read for free here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-the-individual-society-and-the-state]

De Casseres, B. (1936) Saint Tantalus [e-book], The Anarchist Library. [Available to read for free here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/benjamin-de-casseres-saint-tantalus]

Hart, D. B. (2007) The Story of Christianity: A History of 2,000 Years of the Christian Faith [e-book], London: Quercus.

Mirandola, G. P. D. and Caponigri (trans.) (1966) Oration on the Dignity of Man, Chicago: Henry Regnery Company. [Available to read for free here: http://www.andallthat.co.uk/uploads/2/3/8/9/2389220/pico_-_oration_on_the_dignity_of_man.pdf]

Powys, J. C. (1933) A Philosophy of Solitude, New York: Simon and Schuster. [Available to read for free here: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.260410]

Read, H. (1969) The Green Child, London: Penguin.

As the elliptical ending suggests, I will follow it up in future posts with a brief history of anarchism. An abridged version of this history is already available in my thesis, ranging from the formation of the anarchist movement during the fallout of the First International through to the controversial tactic Propaganda of the Deed. However, the original history contained much more detail and also examined the US movement.

I believe that there is much to learn from anarchism, even if one does not agree with its conclusions. Questioning authority is a useful reflex to develop in everyday life, finding ways that we might act more freely in the here and now. for those curious, it is well worth checking out The Anarchist Library, an online repository of anarchist texts which can be read and downloaded for free. Now, without further ado:

Any account of anarchism begins with the problem of definition. How to represent a social philosophy which is by its very nature anti-representational? The difficulties that attend a representation of anarchism are compounded by both its continued and widespread misperception as well as its fluid, protean nature. Firstly, there is no capital-A “Anarchism” in the same way there is Marxism – that is, Jun writes, “as an ideology; a uniform, comprehensive, self-contained, and internally consistent system of ideas; a set of doctrines; or a body of theory.” (Jun, 2012: 110) David Graeber writes that with anarchism “[w]e are talking less about a body of theory […] than about an attitude, or perhaps one might even say a faith.” (Graeber, 2004: 4) Goldman defines anarchism as “the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.” (Goldman, 1998: 64)

As a modern political movement, anarchism originates in nineteenth century Europe, however, histories of its underlying philosophy often find the same anti-authoritarian attitudes and arguments present in movements and texts which far predate the nineteenth century and contest its European origins – such as the work of Daoist philosopher Bao Jingyan, the decentralized communalism of many traditional African societies, the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1577) by Étienne de La Boétie, or the proto-communism of the Diggers during the English Civil War. The fact that strikingly similar arguments have appeared across such a wide range of historical, geographical, philosophical and political contexts suggests something Heraclitan about the anarchist spirit. Peter Marshall describes anarchism as being “like a river with many currents and eddies, constantly changing and being refreshed by new surges but always moving towards the wide of ocean of freedom.” (Marshall, 2008: 3)

Anarchists themselves have diverged, often radically, on questions of the meaning of anarchy, the justification for pursuing anarchy, the strategies or tactics for achieving anarchy, and the forms of organisation that constitute anarchy. However, anarchists are largely united in their rejection of coercive authority and top-down power structures, as well as their belief that anarchy presents a vision of a freer and more just society which can be realised and achieved through specific ideas and practices.

Anarchy exists as a kind of inversion of the current, statist world we inhabit, latent within the gaps and interstices of its structures of power – like a seed beneath the snow, or a wildflower bursting through a crack in the pavement (Ward, 2018: 14). “[A]narchy is life,” Nathan Jun writes, not in the sense of “biological life but rather the immanent processes of change, development, and becoming” which characterise human existence – a vitality which involves “nothing more than the harmonious relationship between maximum freedom and maximum equality.”(Jun, 2012: 126) Before proceeding to a broader explanation of how anarchists understand the term, it is worth tracing it back to its original conception in political thought.

Anarchy derives from the ancient Greek anarkhia, or anarkos, which is generally interpreted as the state of being without a ruler – its earliest recorded usages being in the works of Homer and Herodotus, where it was used to “describe situations where there was absence of leaders, a leaderless position, or a condition of lawlessness.” (Frantzanas, 2019: 23)1 Conventionally, the term anarchy has signified a complete absence of social order, often being used to conjure up images of chaos and mindless destruction, a Hobbesian war of all against all. Indeed, Thomas Hobbes deploys the term in this way at the outset of political modernity to refer to his idea of a brutish, pre-historical “state of nature” which stands opposed to civilization and its achievements (Hobbes, 2017: 344). The word has retained these negative connotations right up until the present day.

However, with the French socialist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s publication of What is Property? in 1840, the term anarchy gains a new signification. For Proudhon, anarchy did not necessarily imply a brutish form of social disorder, but instead society’s “highest perfection.” He contends that “Anarchy, – the absence of a master, of a sovereign, - such is the form of government to which we are every day approximating, and which our accustomed habit of taking man for our rule, and his will for law, leads us to regard as the height of disorder and the expression of chaos.” (Proudhon in Woodcock, 1977: 71) For Proudhon, social disorder resulted not from the absence of government, but the negative influence that government had on society through its unequal distribution of wealth in the institution of private property. Latent within Proudhon’s semantic revolution lies a question which has provided the foundation of anarchist thinking ever since – namely, why do we associate the condition of being without a ruler with social chaos?

Indeed, the identification of government with social order has been a fundamental condition, a “paradigmatic unity,” (Malabou, 2023: 10) of Western political thought right from its very inception in ancient Greece, with Aristotle presenting the two as virtually synonymous: “The words constitution and government have the same meaning, and the government, which is the supreme authority in states, must be in the hands of one, or of a few, or of the many.” (Aristotle, 1996: 71) To think politically has therefore meant to think in terms of government, as Catherine Malabou points out: “There’s not a treatise in classical political philosophy that does not begin with joint consideration of sovereign and governmental authority, considered as absolute starting points.” (Malabou, 2023: 10)

Proudhon contends that this “accustomed habit of taking man for our rule” is the source of our association of anarchy with disorder, a psychological phenomenon he elsewhere refers to as the “prejudice in favour of government,” or to simplify it, the “governmental prejudice.” (Proudhon, 2011: 561) Government might appear natural, an imperfect yet necessary form of authority, but Proudhon reminds us that it is a pre-judgement, an inherited form of social relationship which doesn’t necessarily stand up to rational scrutiny: “At the moment that man inquires into the motives which govern the will of his sovereign, – at that moment man revolts.” (Proudhon in Woodcock, 1977: 65)

Proudhon was not the first to pose this question on whether people’s disposition towards the logic of command and obedience is learned or innate – for example, it lies at the heart of Étienne de La Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, which asks “how so many men […] suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him.”(La Boétie, 1975) The question might also be detected in the “indigenous critique” of European social inequalities attributed to Native American orators, such as the seventeenth-century Wendat statesman Kandiaronk, which later European thinkers of the Enlightenment appropriated to envision social arrangements without coercive authority.2 One such Enlightenment figure, William Godwin, contends in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1791) that government “insinuates itself into our personal dispositions and insensibly communicates its own spirit to our private transactions,” and proposed that the perpetual improvement of society through free, rational discourse would render government unnecessary (Godwin, 2015: 19). Within the context of European political modernity, Godwin is often cited as the first anarchist thinker, but Proudhon is the first to address this question of the governmental prejudice and explicitly come to the conclusion that “anarchy” provides the means to a truly just society – one in which people are equally free – and he is as such the first self-declared anarchist (Proudhon in Woodcock, 1977: 65).

Thinkers such as La Boétie, Kandiaronk, Godwin, and Proudhon have all questioned the seeming innateness of authoritarian relations, regarding them more as an acquired habit of thought which is reinforced through existing political and social institutions, perhaps necessary at one stage or another, but now inimical to the realisation of a truly just society. In a similar spirit, anarchists since have rejected the “governmental prejudice” and its equation of coercive authority with social order. Indeed, for the anarchist, anarchy suggests a deeper and more pervasive form of social order – a world where liberty is equally-realisable for all, without coercive authority, hierarchy, or indeed any form of domination – be it governmental, patriarchal, capitalist, nationalist, militarist, religious, ableist, heteronormative, neurotypical, or otherwise.

In place of a society governed by the logics of domination, coercion, and hierarchy, anarchists seek instead to cultivate alternative ways for people to relate to one another as well as the world around them – ways which, as Daniel Colson writes, affirm them in their multiplicity, their unlimited diversity, and “their capacity to compose a world without hierarchy, domination, or forms of dependence other than the free association of radically free and autonomous forces.” (Colson, 2019: 31) Since Proudhon’s time there has been a proliferation of anti-authoritarian struggles gathered under the black flag of anarchism, as the above list indicates, and anarchists have recognised as such that anarchy presents no fixed programme for the future. Rather, as Goldman writes:

Anarchism is not, as some may suppose, a theory of the future to be realized through divine inspiration. It is a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions. The methods of Anarchism therefore do not comprise an iron-clad program to be carried out under all circumstances. Methods must grow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual. (Goldman, 1998: 74)

Where Proudhon proposed a federated system of small producers and cooperatives, combining what he regarded as the positive independence of property3 with the social justice of communism, virtually every notable anarchist or anarchist-adjacent movement or grouping since has offered up new modes of association and forms of praxis to actively resist the encroachment of authoritarian relations. Such examples include federation, mutual aid, direct action, propaganda of the deed, prefiguration, radical decentralisation, voluntary association, insurrection, union of egoists, common or collective ownership, communitarianism, temporary autonomous zones, social ecology, free love, polyamory, and many, many others.

There is no “fixed programme” for anarchism, and these modes of association exist not as determinate strategies for revolution, but as a reservoir of practices and tactics to draw on, develop, and contribute to, as circumstances require. Moreover, whilst anarchists have traditionally reserved their greatest scorn for the State, Capitalism, and organised religion, they have also maintained – as Goldman writes – “that the solution of that evil can be brought about only through the consideration of every phase of life – individual, as well as collective; the internal, as well as the external phases.” (Goldman, 1998: 64) Anarchists recognise that authoritarianism pervades society and everyday life in myriad ways, many of which are not immediately obvious or comprehendible depending on one’s position and social privileges, and therefore a simple critique of the State, Capitalism, or organised religion, is not enough to create a truly free society. As Malabou clarifies:

Anarchism is not, and never has been, simply an attack on the state […]. In fact, the destruction of the state is perhaps not even, or no longer, its leading light. Anarchism is first and foremost a fight against mechanisms of domination, which exceed the sphere of the state strictly speaking and affect all domains of life – public, private, collective, individual. (Malabou, 2023: 8)

Historically, not every anarchist has regarded anarchism as a perpetually open-ended critique in this way, and sectarianism remains a constant possibility throughout its various forms of organisation. But anarchism has also emphasised the need for self-critique perhaps more than other forms of radicalism.

I will now outline some of the key moments from the history of the European anarchist movement, which will help to situate Goldman, Powys, and Anderson, within the broader movement. I will focus particularly on Bakunin’s split from Marx at the First International, the emergence of the controversial tactic propaganda of the deed, and anarchist-communism – the ideology to which Goldman subscribed. Whilst anarchism as a philosophy has a much more extensive history, reaching far back into antiquity and across the globe, it was the advent of the political movement in nineteenth-century Europe which made “anarchy” and “anarchist” terms of approbation.

Works cited:

Aristotle & Everson, S. (ed.) (1996) The Politics and The Constitution of Athens, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Balazs, E. (1964) Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy, New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press.

Bottici, C. (2022) Anarchafeminism, London: Bloomsbury.

Colson, D. & Cohn, J. (trans.) (2019) A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze, Colchester: Minor Compositions.

Frantzanas S. (2019) Redefining anarchy: from metaphysics to politics, Ph.D. Thesis. University of Glasgow.

Godwin, W. (2015) An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, London: Penguin.

Goldman, E. & Shulman, A. K. (ed.) (1998) Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, Amherst: Humanity Books.

Graeber, D. (2004) Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Graeber, D. & Wengrow, D. (2021) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, London: Allen Lane.

Graham, R. (2007) Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Montreal: Black Rose Books.

Hobbes, T. (2017) Leviathan, London: Electric Book.

Honeywell, C. (2021) Anarchism, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Jun, N. (2012) Anarchism and Political Modernity, London: Bloomsbury.

La Boétie, E. (1975) The Politics of Obedience, Montreal: Black Rose Books.

Malabou, C. & Shread, C. (trans.) (2023) Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Marshall, P. (2008) Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, London: Harper Perennial.

Proudhon, P. J. (1994) What is Property?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Proudhon, P. J. & McKay, I. (2011) (ed.) Property is Theft!: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Reader, Oakland: AK Press.

Tucker, B. (1897) Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to Write One [e-book], The Anarchist Library. Available at: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/benjamin-tucker-instead-of-a-book

Ward, C. (2018) Anarchy in Action, Oakland: PM Press.

Woodcock, G. (1977) The Anarchist Reader, Hassocks: Harvester Press.

Reading is, for most, synonymous with existing in the modern world. Whether you are aware of it or not, this subtle and perpetual decoding of signs structures your environment and the place you occupy within it, compelling certain actions whilst discouraging others. Because these words are always pointing elsewhere, they reach out of a given place and a given situation and bring to it things which are not there, telling you how this thing here relates to that thing there. From my humble living room I am suddenly connected to times and places to which I have never been, and to which I could never go. These words carry with them what has happened in the past, the traces of humans being-together in various conglomerations and associations, they recall a legacy of us making-sense together, “mixing memory and desire,” telling us where we have been and where we are going.

It is necessary to elucidate these rather grand if banal fundamentals if we are to get at the even-grander fact of the magic of reading. Because, yes, reading is a form of magic. Not necessarily the magic of stage shows and of rabbit-out-the-hat trickery, although books do often partake of similar techniques. I mean magic in the sense of creating change in the world in a way which seems to operate outside of the chain of cause and effect. In this way, reading appears in the guise of the miraculous. It brings something new into the world which was not there, and couldn’t have been there, before. All language, by making-present something that is otherwise absent, therefore has something faintly magical about it. But it is in books that this power is concentrated, refined, and offered back to the reader in a distilled and potent form.

There is “reading” and then there is “reading for pleasure,” and here I will be focusing my attention on the latter. Reading for pleasure, that is, the solitary activity of absorbing oneself in pages and pages of printed words, vividly hallucinating from mere blots of ink, the “hocus pocus that opens a new world,” as the critic J. Hillis Miller puts it. When you emerge from these pages, from this exciting “new world” into the ordinary “old” one, is everything the same? Are you the same person? Here I will argue that to read is to fundamentally alter who you are, how you see the world around you and your place within it. With this inner transformation, which happens every time you pick up a book, it is as if reality has also subtly changed around you, new perspectives emerge and, with them, new possibilities. To reverse a famous occult aphorism – as below so above.

We may “read” now more than ever, but there is also a pervasive sense that “reading for pleasure” is more of a hobby than a general thing that people do. You are either a “book-person” or you are not. Sometimes I come across an article suggesting something to this effect, and that people read less now than they used to. I think declinism is always an easy and reassuring narrative, but it is also a reactionary one. It is reassuring for those who have had the fortune to be brought up in bookish environments and had a love of literature instilled in them from an early age, but we do not live in a culture which makes a good case for the uninitiated. I am more inclined to believe that reading habits have simply changed rather than declined. There are probably multiple, compounding factors which explain, for example, the closure of so many second-hand bookshops around my town, rather than a simple “people don’t read anymore” (with a cross-of-the-arms and a shake-of-the-head). However, the popularity of other forms of entertainment and escapism which offer more immediate thrills must surely be a factor in this. Why spend so long immersing yourself in a single narrative when you can get multiple snapshots of human life, drama, comedy, and engaging oddity, in a matter of seconds, and without having to rely on your imagination to do any of the heavy-lifting?

Yet, it is exactly within this imaginative effort that books attain their magical quality. Guiding your mind through the words, you bring a whole world into being. Words, ideas, associations, knit together in your mind. You come across a forest, it is described in a few stark sentences, it is you who fills in the gaps and, at least for a while, exists there. This character reminds you of someone you know, and perhaps you then like this character or dislike them for it, or perhaps you come to a new understanding of why their real-life counterpart is as they are. Yes, it is the author who has put the words down onto the paper, but you are the one who lifts them back up into the realm of imagination, you are the one performing the spell. This is a kind of magic not possible with film or television, where all the sensory content has already been worked out for you and set at a pace you cannot control. Each reader will have a totally distinct and unique interaction with a book by virtue of their being a distinct and unique person. Each author will, either explicitly or implicitly, present a different way-of-being through their choice of words, situations, characters, etc., and in encountering this different way-of-being we come to recognise our own.

Mass literacy is a relatively recent phenomenon, and this fact is worth underscoring. Going back several generations, most people wouldn’t have had access to literature, let alone possess the skills to read. Reading, or listening to another person read, would have mostly been restricted to the Bible, or maybe a moral narrative such as The Pilgrim’s Progress. Church-sanctioned Christianity provided the super-reality behind the mere appearances of the world, the heaven beyond the sky and the soul within the person. To question these stories would have been to deny truth itself and to live in falsehood. But books provided a way out of this furrow of reality, into the wider field of being and perhaps even to the wild woods beyond. The higher in social status you were the more access you had to books, the upper echelons gate-kept this powerful magic. A novel I recently read by Alan Garner, Strandloper (1996), tells of a Cheshire rural labourer in the early 1800s who gets arrested and banished to the prison colonies of Australia for learning to read and write. The local landowner sees the protagonist’s efforts to “improve” themselves as a threat to his own power. Set in the years following the French Revolution, there is the palpable sense that reading is a means to “get above one’s station,” providing access to a store of subversive and seditious ideas. Here, the magic of books is definitely no sleight of hand trickery but something genuine, powerful, and potentially world-changing. John Cowper Powys puts it well in this memorable formulation:

“Though books, as Milton says, may be the embalming of mighty spirits, they are also the resurrection of rebellious, reactionary, fantastical and wicked spirits! In books dwell all the demons and all the angels of the human mind. It is for this reason that a book-shop — especially a second-hand book-shop — is an arsenal of explosives, an armoury of revolutions, an opium-den of reactions.” (Powys, 1946: 2-3)

Because books contain all that is best and worst of human nature, “the divine anarchy of the soul", Powys concludes that “they are still, as they have always been, an object of suspicion to every kind of ruling authority.”

We now take for granted the sheer number of thought-worlds we can inhabit compared to our ancestors, and for a relatively miniscule cost. There are more books than ever before, an “appalling” number, as Powys puts it elsewhere. What once might have made one an object of suspicion now feels almost banal. Nowadays, “reading for pleasure” seems almost like a superfluous activity for which we constantly must think up new justifications. Maybe there are too many possible super-realities behind the mere appearances, such an abundance that each one in and of itself seems worthless. But this multiplication of thought-worlds does not have to lead to a kind of nihilistic relativity. I think that would be to think in economical and quantitative rather than qualitative terms, as if each book can be placed on a set of scales and assigned a numerical value.

But the quantified world we live in encourages exactly this kind of economical weighing-up, one in which books are simply the foodstuffs for one’s marketable identity. An analogy might be drawn between a well-prepared meal and nutritional supplements; if the benefits of your reading cannot be quantified, easily digested and assimilated into the fibre of your character, it is a waste of time and energy. Books must fit into an algorithm, have clearly defined themes and moral stances, and they must stand out from every other book whilst also leaning in. The emergence of “Smart Thinking” sections in bookshops is also a symptom of this kind of commodification, catering for an urban, upwardly-mobile audience who are looking to get a “smart” edge in our increasingly competitive society. There is of course an echo of Strandloper here, with people using books to “better” themselves, but it begs the question as to what ends such coveted “smarts” can be used. The same can be said of “completionists” and snobs, those whose mission is to read everything and use their knowledge to feel better than others.

I’m not innocent of such smugness. It is admittedly a great feeling to have read a weighty and difficult tome, to have experienced something you know not many have. Neither can this kind of feeling be dispensed with entirely. What I am arguing for, to proffer another analogy, is a ramble led by curiosity rather than a hike led by a desire for achievement. After a solid ramble, there is a sense of weary satisfaction at having stretched the legs, but this is not the goal of the excursion. Likewise, reading is not about how many pages you can do in a week, or what righteous truths you might extract from a book. Reading is about the quality of your experience. It is about variety, about inhabiting different worlds, about confronting and listening to unfamiliar and often difficult points of view, about dwelling within ambiguity.

As long as another human is responsible for setting down the words on the page, it doesn’t matter if it is Shakespeare or high fantasy or erotica, the “quality” can come from anywhere. Another Powys quote:

“Not the airiest lyric, not the most humorous comedy, not the most thrilling tale of adventure but, on its own particular level and in its own peculiar vein, offers some commentary, creates some mood, stirs up some speculation, emphasizes some significant fact, or theory, or feeling, which in its special connection, and in its own tone, accent and measure, criticizes our life upon earth.” (Powys, 1946: 1)

The “pleasure” of reading comes from enriching your experience in this way. When the rhythm of the prose finally clicks, when new vistas open up after so many pages of winding prose, when you encounter a vague feeling you have had before set down so clearly and beautifully in words which, until that point, had eluded you. Even when you are able to say quite roundly that you don’t like a book, even this sour occasion can be turned into a good. However, there must first be a willingness to suspend your disbelief, your prejudices, even your very sense of self, for the magic to work. You have to create a “magic circle” outside of ordinary reality and everyday concerns, and enter into a different state of mind. There are different ways to achieve this “magic circle” depending on your own temperament and your chosen reading (as Walt Whitman writes: “it makes such a difference where you read”). I personally enjoy being either stretched out on the sofa, with the window left open to allow outside sounds to drift in with the breeze, or somewhere outside where there is perpetual but unobtrusive ambient noise, like by the sea, on a park bench, or in a café.

Arguably, one of the reasons why we must continually justify “reading for pleasure” is that we hold onto an old suspicion about books. We believe that books, especially novels, are inherently false. On the one hand, there is “real life,” that which is immediately apparent to our senses, and on the other hand there is “fiction,” that which has no basis in reality. Perhaps this old prejudice is much like that of the bitter landowner in Strandloper, undergirded not by a belief that this is how reality is but how it should be. Of course, in actuality, the world has been and is still in continual flux, and the boundaries between “reality” and “fiction” are constantly being redrawn. This is not to say that dragons will one day exist, or that we can re-write history according to our whims, but what I mean is that we should know by now that the ideas we have about the world and how it works are not the same thing as the world and how it works.

The map should not be confused for the territory, and to say that we objectively have a firmer grip on reality now than we did then is pure narcissism. Perhaps we have a more scientific grip on the world around us, but what about the age-old business of getting on together and solving problems collectively? In this way, reading fiction does not carve out a separate space from everyday reality, rather it shows the extent to which our everyday experience relies on fictionality, on cultivated myths and carefully calculated appearances. Picking up a book from several hundred years ago, you might be startled by the extent to which matters which seem trivial now are treated with the utmost gravitas. At the same time, pick up the 2^nd century Roman novel Apuleius’ The Golden Ass and it is equally-startling to find passages brimming with delightfully crass toilet humour.

But it is exactly this, seeing what has vanished, what has drifted away, as well as what remains and what endures, that makes reading so powerful. By reading, you enter into a conversation that stretches across millennia. The “magic circle” of reading, so markedly different from everyday perception, is much like the kind of conversations that occur late at night, when hours can drift by unnoticed as two persons lay bare their inmost-dwelling thoughts and feelings to one another. The enchanting force that binds the reader’s eyes to the page is a similar kind of intimacy premised on mutual discovery and mutual recognition. But there is also mystery in this encounter, and it is as impossible to fully “get” a book as much as it is impossible to fully “get” another person. No matter how many times you re-read a book, how thoroughly you know the personal and historical circumstances that prompted its original creation (or, for that matter, what drew you to read it), there remains an ungraspable otherness which stubbornly resists explanation. This is where the true magic of books lies – that they are a perpetual wellspring of ineffability, of unboundedness, and of creation, to which you can return again and again to draw fresh insight and humility.

I have named the Substack “Seeds beneath the snow,” a phrase I currently use for my Instagram bio. It originally comes from the anarchist Colin Ward, who uses it to describe how a libertarian society is:

“…always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism.” (Ward, 2018: 14)

It is a great opening to a book I highly recommend, and one which upended my way of thinking about the world and our possibilities within it. That poetic image of the seed beneath the snow stuck with me, evoking a sense of hope about our collective future, but nevertheless one premised on something that already exists in the here and now. It joins together the ideal and the practical in a way I have come to realise is characteristic of the kinds of thinking I am drawn to.

The phrase is then used again by David Goodway for his study on anarchism and British literature, Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward. This study was a huge inspiration for my thesis as Goodway devotes two whole chapters to exploring John Cowper Powys’s relation to anarchism. His analysis of Powys’s idiosyncratic individualist anarchism is perhaps the best exposition of his philosophy around, and something I want to build upon here.

It therefore seemed appropriate to use this phrase as a title, seeing as it captures both the origins of my thesis as well as the purpose of this Substack. I hope to grow the seeds of ideas sown during my research, but also to offer those ideas to others so that they might “grow” them in their own life. Despite the slightly arcane-sounding nature of my thesis, the argument arose from very practical considerations around reading which originated through my own, personal reading. As such, the image of the seed also captures another aspect of my work, a refusal to separate my thinking from my life.

Powys was not only an individualist anarchist, but an egoist, and what makes his philosophy so vital is that he roots it in his own, immediate experience. In The Meaning of Culture (1929), he articulates how each person possesses their own “plant-like” philosophy, or “life-illusion” (an important term for Powys and one I will unpack in a later post), whose “outer leaves, like those of a floating water-plant, expand in the sunshine and in the rain of pure chance.” Powys’s use of naturalistic imagery here underscores the value he places on immediate sensory experience, on remaining open and receptive to the elements and “the sunshine and rain of pure chance.” But he also balances this openness to experience with an emphasis on each person’s ability to imagine their way into a happier world:

“Since we are men and women, however, there soon arrives a moment when our philosophy loses its plant-like passivity. Grown now into a conscious system of thought it draws from the flowing saps and vegetative essences of its organic sub-life an active integral consciousness which feeds upon the spectacle of the world. It projects sensitised antennae, this consciousness; it thrusts forth a moth-like tongue. It selects, refuses, advances and recoils before what confronts it. And yet the further it explores… and that is the whole secret of the mysterious process… the more does its awareness of its buried life become vivid and paramount. It is perhaps the most important moment of all in the secret growth of our philosophy when we first discover the unbelievable power of the imaginative will in giving a heightened value to our days.” (Powys, 1974: 11-12)

This passage is representative of Powys’s style of philosophising. It can feel gestural (a stylistic survival from his days as a peripatetic lecturer) but also very specific in its heaping-up of expressions. Images and metaphors are taken-up for effect and then swiftly replaced or even discarded altogether. Powys was a keen walker and much of his writing, including his philosophy and his fiction, requires one to indulge his rambling and roundabout way. But the parade of vivid images and suggestive formulations has a cumulative effect, and just as he is outlining the liberatory potential of the “imaginative will,” page after page, the reader grows steadily aware of their own latent powers of creation.

Originally, I had intended my thesis to take a much more autobiographical or autoethnographic approach, which would have helped to demonstrate my argument (that is, the impossibility of disentangling one’s reading from one’s life – how we often find ourselves reflected in our reading and our reading reflected in our life). To analyse how these writers conceived of reading as a power to shape one’s life required looking to how their work had impacted my own life. The opening of my thesis retains this autobiographical approach, albeit spliced somewhat awkwardly with historical context. However, I came to find that, as I was dealing with an unorthodox set of writers from an academically-unorthodox position, the necessary work of exposition and reiteration made such an approach untenable.

Here I am looking to bring these two streams together again. I am concerned with how the quality of our imaginative life can enrich our actual lived experience, and vice versa. Powys, individuality, egoism, will supply only some of the themes I want to explore, as well as the work of Emma Goldman and Margaret Anderson. I share with Powys a love for walking, especially walking in nature, and this will provide one “life” source for future posts. Besides this, there are the following topics which all, at one point or another, featured in earlier drafts of the thesis.

I spent a long time looking into the intertwined histories of magic and critical literacy, both discourses having informed one another and feeding into literary culture. To put it very (very) generally, magic and literature both deal with the imaginative summoning of forces that either aren’t there or aren’t immediately obvious. Powys often invokes a magical terminology when discussing books, and through reading studies such as William Covino’s Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy: An Eccentric History of the Composing Imagination (1994) and Ioan Couliano’s Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (1987), I came to understand how magic’s claim to exercise subtle forms of power (be it spiritual or psychological in essence) could be read alongside anarchism (as a frame for understanding power relations). Compare this passage from Couliano to Powys’s description of the development of imaginative willpower:

“Renaissance culture was a culture of the phantasmic. It lent tremendous weight to the phantasms evoked by inner sense and had developed to the utmost the human faculty of working actively upon and with phantasms. It had created a whole dialectic of Eros in which phantasms, which at first foisted themselves upon inner sense, ended by being manipulated at will.” (Couliano, 1987: 193)

The relation between neurodivergence and reading was also another unexplored horizon of the thesis, something I originally thought would play a more fundamental role in my argument. I found that the fact of neurodivergence (that is, neurodivergence as difference rather than deficiency) combined with the fact that reading is not a “natural” but an acquired skill (as Matthew Rubery writes, “there is no single activity known as reading”) upended how we conceive of the task of literary criticism, its purpose, its ethical stakes, and what it might reveal about us. The experience of reading, how it involves one on an imaginative, emotional, and even physical level, must differ enormously from reader to reader.

Another under-explored area, which might even prove to be the bigger idea of the Substack, is hinted at in the following passage from Emma Goldman:

“The problem that confronts us today, and which the nearest future is to solve, is how to be one’s self and yet in oneness with others, to feel deeply with all human beings and still retain one’s own characteristic qualities. This seems to me to be the basis upon which the mass and the individual, the true democrat and the true individuality, man and woman, can meet without antagonism and opposition. The motto should not be: Forgive one another; rather, Understand one another. The oft-quoted sentence of Madame de Staël: “To understand everything means to forgive everything,” has never particularly appealed to me; it has the odor of the confessional; to forgive one’s fellow-being conveys the idea of pharisaical superiority. To understand one’s fellow-being suffices.” (Goldman, 1998: 158-159)

The ethical stance suggested in these lines is what ties Goldman to Powys and Anderson. All three were writing in the immediate wake of an overbearing, stultifying Victorian Christianity where, for example, charity (despite its claim to the contrary) was conditional upon one’s “moral improvement.” Powys likewise critiques Christian notions of love in his late masterpiece Porius (1951), set in the “dark ages” of Britain, where the character of Myrddin warns the protagonist of the new Christ cult spreading across the land: “I tell you wherever there is what they call “love” there is hatred too and lust for obedience! What the world wants is more common-sense, more kindness, more indulgence, more leaving people alone.” (Powys, 2007: 521)

Both Powys and Goldman critique what they perceive as the underlying power structures inherent to institutional Christian morality. Here is where I am on shaky ground. I perceived a kind of shared ethical stance which rejects specific foundational claims of Christianity, but my knowledge of this religion is not enough to make any bold pronouncements. Indeed, this might not be anything to do with Christianity, but simply the institutionalised form the religion took which influenced the dominant ways of thinking during the period I am looking at.

Put very simply, the ethical stance might be formulated thus: Letting things be as they are rather than trying to change them in the name of a higher power. I think there is much to learn in this, especially when it comes to different cognitive styles living harmoniously together. It is here that reading can become such a useful tool in our lives. I’ll end with another quotation from Powys that I think suggests why:

“But of all the activities culture pursues, in its effort to deepen our awareness of the multifarious magic of life, the one which ought most profoundly to influence us in the direction of humility is the reading of books. When one things what one owes to books, when one discovers again and again the extraordinary illuminations that have come to us from reading books, one’s pride in one’s own originality finds itself forced back to the honest, primordial ground where it has alone a right to expand and expatiate, the ground, namely, that we are what we are, different, peculiar, unique, but not superior to anyone.” (Powys, 1974: 187-188)

Works mentioned:

Couliano, I. (1987) Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Covino, W. (1994) Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy: An Eccentric History of the Composing Imagination, Albany: SUNY Press.

Goldman, E. (1998) Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, Amherst: Humanity Books.

Goodway, D. (2012) Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward, Oakland: PM Press.

Powys, J. C. (1974) The Meaning of Culture, London: Village Press.

Powys, J. C. (2007) Porius, New York: Overlook Press.

Rubery, M. (2022) Reader’s Block: A History of Reading Differences, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Ward, C. (2018) Anarchy in Action, Oakland: PM Press.

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