I recently read "The Rose Field", the final book in the series Book of Dust by Philip Pullman. It's a follow up trilogy on His Dark Materials, which recently had a TV series adaptation made by the BBC, and previously a film was made back in like 2006, "The Golden Compass."
Pullman writes a story about a world where people's souls live outside of their bodies, taking the shape of an animal that speaks and lives side by side with their person. He calls it their Daemon, and it's a terrific narrative device.
In the second book of this second series one of the main cast, Pan (a Daemon) leaves the other protagonist Lyra (Pan's human) in order to find the latter's imagination, which he believed that she had lost. Over the journey, they both separately ponder the nature of Imagination, why Pan had gone to such lengths to find something he wasn't sure about. Lyra is also tasked with finding "The Alkahest", of which she has never heard of.
In the end, they both find their answers, the importance of imagination, and what Alkahest truly is. I think Pullman has observed how the world is changing, how imagination, play, creativity, and interpersonal relationships are left to wither to make room for money. I'll quote some bits of it here.
Spoiler for the climax of "The Rose Field" by Philip Pullman
It is the universal solvent, just as it says in the encyclopedia. The destroyer of bonds. Look at what’s happening here—all the old ways and habits that brought people together, like bartering and trading—just dissolved. Wiped away by new ways people don’t fully understand. The new roads that go who knows where but just tear up the rose gardens and knock down perfectly good houses.
What’s the closest bond there is? It’s between people and their dæmons. Somehow when you’re separated, like we are, the bond is still there, but this isn’t the same at all. With the sickness here, people just seem indifferent. They’re not interested anymore. But it’s not just happening here. It’s every kind of bond, in our world as well. Like the new Master of Jordan, breaking the old connection between me and the college, because I was costing them too much. It sounded so reasonable when he said it. Money. They had to save money, because…Everything about the alkahest is reasonable. It’s reasonable to make money, to save money…
“All being dissolved. The more I see, the more obvious it seems…I really think I’m beginning to understand at last. Everything having to give way to money.”
Of course people have always knocked things down and built other things in their place. But money’s different somehow. It swallows everything… […] But Thuringia Potash and all these other companies are only interested in the rose oil as a unit of value. If an acre of roses makes money, fine, but because the roses and the oil themselves aren’t important, they’ll tear them up in a moment. All those fields being dug up: it isn’t because the developers hate the roses, it’s because they can make more per acre by growing peanuts, or by building a factory.”
“The thing that troubles me most […] It’s something like this. In making rose oil, each part of the process is an end in itself. The roses are beautiful as they grow. Distilling the rosewater and making the oil are crafts worth knowing, things worth doing in themselves, things you can get better at and take pride in. So people who did them used to have a connection with the soil and the seasons and the light and the weather, and they felt the sun and the wind and the rain on their skins—the alkahest will change all that. They’ll soon be sitting in offices under artificial light, entering figures into ledgers and account books, and their dæmons will be dying beside them, and no one will care, and no one will know why.”
What I take from this is that money has this effect of always taking a precedent. It makes sense for it to, because it is the means with which we navigate a capitalist society. We've constructed society in such a way that everything always has to give way to money some way or another. By letting money take precedent, we're destroying our bonds to other people, we're destroying our bonds to nature, and we're destroying our bonds to ourselves, our creativity, our imagination, and we do so while giving ourselves completely reasonable justifications for it.
The message that we're slowly killing our souls isn't exactly subtle, but I get it. We've gotten to a point where some people are happy to outsource their thinking and creativity to machines, all in the service of money. People build fake followings on social media, just to make money.
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