Discovering Alan and Oscar at the Bookstore with a Banana

Over the weekend I went to Book People, my favorite bookstore.  By the way, this Oscar Wilde quote has been over the counter for years (photo at right): “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Anyway, I was looking for a good book, something philosophical, mystical, thought provoking.  What I found was a little book by the name of Nature, Man and Woman by Alan Watts.  This is a bombshell of a book, one of those books so thick with excellent points, so devoid of fluff, that if you try to highlight “the good stuff” you end up highlighting the entire book (that’s what happened to me, so I just put the highlighter down).

I really hope you’ll give it a read, so I won’t spoil it with a complete review.  What I will do is throw a taste at you, in the form of a representative quote.

“For it is strictly incorrect to think of the progressive cultures as materialistic, if the materialist is one who loves concrete materials.  No modern city looks as if it were made by people who love materials.   The truth is rather that progressive man hates material and does everything possible to obliterate its resistances, its spatial and temporal limits.  Increasingly his world consists of end-points, of destinations and goals with the times and spaces between them eliminated by jet propulsion.  Consequently there is little material satisfaction in reaching the goal, since a life full of goals and end-points is like trying to abate one’s hunger by eating merely the two precise ends of a banana.  The concrete reality of the banana is, on the contrary, all that lies between the two ends, the journey as it were, all that jet propulsion cuts out.”

~Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman (New York, Vintage Books (1970) p. 16-17)

That’s all I got for now.  Have great day.  Start by eating the entire fucking banana, except for the skin of course.