Joyce Cary on the "Free Mind"

A favorite pastime of mine is to read interviews and essays in the archives of the Paris Review. I also have a subscription to the New York Review of Books, but they cover a lot of politics, which kind of defeats the purpose. What I'm trying to do is interrupt my default mode of reading about politics online. So do I really want to read about contemporaneous views of Vietnam, the Iran-Contra affair, or Bill Clinton's travails? To say nothing of our 21st century political dumpster fires? No, I do not.

The Paris Review doesn't do politics except to the extent it might appear organically within the larger context of a story or interview or essay. I especially love the interviews, which hew closely to matters of craft and art and worldviews. Poets tend to give the best interviews. Often I spend more time thinking about what they have to say than reading their actual poems. I'll pull a few up at the Poetry Foundation website, but keep returning to their reflections on what it means to try to see the world in a poetic way.

The further back in the archives I go I will encounter authors that were prominent at the time but who are less spoken of now. Usually that's just a matter of fashion and not quality. For example, I was intrigued by a 1954 interview with the Irish novelist Joyce Cary. In it, he said he does not like for novels to engage in philosophy directly, hammering out problems and proposals within the text. He said that the philosophy should be in the background. When the interviewer asked him what he meant by background he said something that struck me as true, which I will share here:

"The whole setup—character—of the world as we know it. Roughly, for me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity. A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment."

He's put his finger on something here, something which reveals why efforts to bluntly or broadly rid the world of injustice always go haywire. The free mind recoils against coercion or suppression, no matter how well intended. There doesn't seem to be an answer, per se, in what Cary is saying here. Just an acknowledgement of dynamism. I guess there is a reason Hindus worship both Vishnu, the preserver of the world, and Shiva, who destroys the world in order to recreate it.