Something the modern world has forgotten. He is convinced that there is some “Great and Secret Knowledge” hidden somewhere in the world. If Piranesi embodies the “premodern man” who exists in a state of “original participation,” I think the Other, to whom we have been indirectly introduced in this first chapter, embodies a lonely modernist. If you read very long you’ll bump into another notion: re-enchantment. So there is a sense of loss, of hauntedness. We live, as Alison Milbank writes in “the Kantian world of dead objects.” Taylor observes the perceived loss in the way that the modern person experiences the world. This notion has been picked up by authors like Charles Taylor who argues that the secular self perceives the world through an “imminent frame,” where God may exist, but nothing in the material world shares divine meaning or life.
#PIRANESI HOUSE FULL#
The sociological historian Max Weber (1864-1920) famously argued that modernity was characterised by a movement toward rationality, which he describes as a process of “disenchantment.” Weber suggests that the pre-modern individual existed in an “enchanted garden,” a place full of mystery and meaning where the natural world was a book which revealed aspects of the nature of God, and everything oozed with a significance beyond its mere material existence. This endeavour is tied up with another notion: disenchantment. This is one of the questions that Clarke imaginatively explores in Piranesi. What would it be like if we weren’t alienated from the natural world? We speak of the “environment” as if it is something quite separate from ourselves, and not that from which these bodies of ours draw their very substance. Ingrained to a “habit of inattention,” we began to treat the world as an object quite separate from ourselves, and thus quite alien. In his essay “The Rediscovery of Meaning,” Owen Barfield tries to account for the “pure cussedness” of the fact that “the more able man becomes to manipulate the world to his advantage, the less he can perceive any meaning in it.” Barfield argues that when the scientific method hardened into an epistemological outlook, the horizons of scientific knowledge exponentially expanded, while the vistas of meaning began to contract. In this post, I want to offer some of thoughts, and draw your attention to two important themes in the book: Alienation and Kindness. In this first episode I talk with my brother Joel Clarkson about our experience reading it out loud together last autumn, and give a literary and thematic introduction to the book. You can read more about why I chose Piranesi in last week’s post, and catch all the details for how the book club will run at the bottom of this page.
I’m excited to invite you into the world of this strange and beautiful book. I’ve been counting down the days to the commencement of our summer book club on Piranesi by Susannah Clarke… and it’s finally here! I’ve hosted an online bookclub each summer for the last four years, and every year I enjoy it more than the last.
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