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Food for thought for sure, From Hell is a complex piece of work with many layers of human emotions, expressions, and delusions.

One thing I particularly like about Alan Moore is his all-pervading kindness to everyone he presents in his works, both villains and heroes, victims and criminals.

So, we see Sir William Gull— a genius, a murderer, deranged to many but sure of his superiority only found his true nature of derangement and inferiority in his visit to a higher plain.

There are some memorable panels and monologues that will keep me thinking for quite a while.

Although Moore used Hinton's fourth dimension as a central concept of this work, he— probably with his modern sense of four-dimensional space understood the fourth dimension as time, whereas Hinton's was an Euclidean one. However, since the Euclidean dimensions are all spatial it may have helped Moore to think along the line where he can craft a simile like the panels above— where he compared the causality with architecture.

A masterpiece!

The version in my digital garden has richer formatting and related notes and highlights.

The course of knowledge is like the flow of some mighty river, which, passing through the rich lowlands, gathers into itself the contributions from every valley. Such a river may well be joined by a mountain stream, which, passing with difficulty along the barren highlands, flings itself into the greater river down some precipitous descent, exhibiting at the moment of its union the spectacle of the utmost beauty of which the river system is capable. And such a stream is no inapt symbol of a line of mathematical thought, which, passing through difficult and abstract regions, sacrifices for the sake of its crystalline clearness the richness that comes to the more concrete studies. Such a course may end fruitlessly, for it may never join the main course of observation and experiment. But, if it gains its way to the great stream of knowledge, it affords at the moment of its union the spectacle of the greatest intellectual beauty, and adds somewhat of force and mysterious capability to the onward current.

If not anything else, this spirit (and the execution of it) is an excellent reason to write such a wonderful 32-page pamphlet with striking yet easily understandable ideas.

If you fail to find anything new in this book in regard to the fourth dimension, that is probably because this is one of those works that popularised those ideas.

As the name reveals, this book is a musing/speculation about the fourth dimension.

Hinton's four-dimensional space is an Euclidean one. This shouldn't be confused with the non-Euclidean four-dimensional space like the Minkowski's which was the basis of the Theory of Relativity. Hinton never mentioned time as the fourth dimension and it would've required a paradigm shift on Hinton's part. While it is not the spacetime we know now, it is quite an interesting system.

I liked how— example by example— Hinton built a system of fourth-dimensional space in a few pages which is consistent— complete with physical properties and consciousness, sound in its structure and extremely thought-provoking.

I was born when 'spacetime' was no longer a novel idea. It is a given, in any modern science-fiction. There are numerous books explaining this in great detail for laymen like me.

These 3 panels presuppose your knowledge of spacetime yet will amaze you with the novelty of expression. Beautiful!

The review in my digital garden also have a links for various related materials and notes and highlights I took while reading.

Guy Debord was not prophesizing. Quite the contrary. He observed these phenomena in his own time. Our feeling of eerie accuracy of describing our society is due to the fact that the disease is now more acute than ever.

There's no way to deny that symbolism leads the way to abstraction, and abstraction allows us to build broader logical systems. Most of our achievements as a species owes much to that. Money, or state, even most of the philosophies, and ethics are mostly make-believe. But, these are not imaginary either. These are inter-subjectively real.

What Debord labelled as the Spectacles are not merely symbols. They are symbols, which doesn't represent the entity they symbolize. According to Debord these spectacles create a false sense of reality devoid of an underlying layer of synapses to any real interest of life:

2: The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.

It should be noted that this phenomenon is not merely psychological. It is a socio-psycho-economic condition with several feedback loops at work. It creates a tendency to acquire things for status or conformity instead of their intended usability or with complete misunderstanding of what the product really is.

6: Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations— news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment— the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle also represents the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the production process.

A false sense of ownership follows, where in reality we got sold completely. In the digital world, NFTs are just that.

This commodification and subsequent commodification of culture where we try to conform to the dominant way of life brings in to the existence a new type of salespeople with a much shrewd strategy working behind this clueless class:

The admirable people who personify the system are well known for not being what they seem; they attain greatness by stooping below the reality of the most insignificant individual life, and everyone knows it.

Debord didn't have a name for it. We call them the influencers.

What is the way out of it? That I don't really know. This machination is at work for a long time.

The abundance of commodities— that is, the abundance of commodity relations— amounts to nothing more than an augmented survival.

And when even the rebellion is yet another way to conform, we can consider the future pretty bleak.

The main review in my digital garden also contains links to related content and notes and highlights from the book I took while reading.

What is the Book is About?

Like the prolonged helplessness of its young, like bisexual reproduction, the inevitable fact of death provides one of the great parameters of the human condition. It can neither be “believed” nor “magicked” nor “scienced” away.

That is basically the justification of Thanatology, the subject of this book. The writer covered a lot of her contemporary ground— briefly, but with some interesting insights.

The first of these insights, expounded well in Part I, is about the change of modes and methods of death and dying in modern, technologically advanced Western societies, and how it led us to a prolonged dying phase.

This change leads to changes regarding how a dying person (and people related) can choose (and the limitations on such choices by socio-economic conditions) to die, or live for the remaining of the days.

In Part III, she gave an overview of the then-contemporary movement to help people to die happily.

My Takeaway

The writing is very much descriptive in nature. She tried her best to cast an impartial gaze on the situation. The subject, however, is a cross-school one. This adds some complexity.

Her exploration of modern craft of dying in Part I & Part II were sharp and to the point. It's a must-read, along with The Denial of Death by Earnest Becker, to understand the modern ideas about the death.

However, her portrayal of the happy death movement in the Part III shows the dismal state of affairs on that front. No modern person in their right mind can take Kübler-Ross's “Research” seriously:

Befitting a movement largely composed of presumably secular upper-middle-class professionals, the immortality claim rests not on revelation but on “research.” That is, Kübler-Ross and others know there is an afterlife not as a consequence of any direct communication with a deity but because of “evidence,” such as the following accounts, provided by the recovered “clinically dead.”

This is a deal-breaker for me. Of course, Lofland is mostly a chronicler here, and she had her doubts too.

If I follow the advice of one such movement, I'll have a very unhappy death for sure. Instead, I would like to assume a dying role for me which is based on knowledge and emotional understanding of what it means to be dead.

This is one of those books that added a layer to my being. My admiration to Matsuo Bashō starts here.

Firstly, I think Sam Hamill is an excellent translator. Not only he translated the book, he provided a splendid preface to put things into perspective.

This collection contains two of Bashō's travelogues, and some of his Haikus.

Bashō lived in a war-torn feudal Japan. Travel, naturally, came with quite some danger in the path. His advanced age was not in his favour also. But neither the danger nor the fatigue dissuade Bashō. Instead, soldier's grave brought some haikus and there were Pine forests and Full-moons to wash away his fatigue.

Apart from Bashō exquisite inner-life, another important aspect that shined through the description is how culturally aware the people of Japan were regardless of their class. People used to memorize poems with their context, i.e. who, how, and in what situation wrote it. Prostitutes would find solace in poetry when no one is listening to them. I genuinely regret for not being born in that time and place.

This book is very concentrated in its form. Myriad ideas got traversed simultaneously— some from historical incidents, some are pure stories, and some are stories about stories— all intertwined to craft a truly musical offering.

So, what this book is about? Art, literature, music, war, destruction, wastage of human life… But, above all, this is a book about hope, about hope and goodness that doesn't wither. It is a book about love that perseveres amidst the toughest of times.

More hunger will come, and more cold and more death. But there are red flowers. This is food for the eyes. Knowing this, every morning will be a child from now on. And every night a womb. With such knowledge, no one can lose a war.

This is also a book of life— how circular it is, yet how many variances it accommodates— like music— through repetition and variation, how it blooms— often awkwardly, through individual lives to something greater than the sum.

Concepts like freedom, anarchy, and dystopia, etc have been expounded in numerous non-fiction scholarly and popular works. I read some and understood most of them.

But, whenever it is about feeling them, I go back to fiction. Take dystopia as an example. What is a more complete dystopia than the Orwellian ones where there's no light on the other end of a long tunnel of darkness and torment?

Similarly, V for Vendetta gives me a more acute emotional understanding of freedom, and anarchy than anything. That is why, I re-read V for Vendetta this time every year, intended to finish by 5th November.

Maybe there are fellow readers here who would like to discuss/appreciate/criticize V for Vendetta. Let our thoughts flourish!