What an interesting comment, though I don't quite understand why the plot-driven stuff is aligned with the tone, which is not quite "tongue in cheek" to my ears but something close. But the bare-bones version of that family, stripped of any actual magic, is funny and a bit disturbing to contemplate. It's true, most our experience of such generations deep indirection in a family tends to hover around things that warp. The enchantment, in other words, is precisely in the writing style itself.
I will be curious how this treats you. Many many passages I found terribly moving but not always in a "deep" way, which made it all more...deep? meaningful? not TOO meaningful? Now I am plotting when to take on the tetrology again.
That’s interesting…what we consider “deep”…deep thought vs. deep feeling. I’d suggest that what is being moved is the heart and soul. The mind tends to seek out more…more ideas, more thought. When reading a book like Little, Big it’s a good practice to let the mind relax and simply take it in, surrender it to the mythopoetic soul food being offered up. I know you probably get this, I just wanted to try and articulate it for myself.
I came to the comment section with the intention of responding to Eric's post, and your comment is in keeping with the general uncanniness of how much his words spoke to me. I mean, just about everything i've just read has seemed to be almost crafted just for me, to help me understand the 'place' i'm in right now.
So, I just wanted to say I appreciate everything you shared in your comment. To be more specific, your words spoke to my lifelong tendency to maybe want to find 'deeper meaning' in the mundane. Ever since my teens, i've had a habit of trying to make a merely good experience The Ultimate.
So, to read your words about the mythopoetic as a source of relaxation was really right on for me.
I read back through the project update history, and it strikes me that the long delay really boils down to someone just not asking for help. Amazing what happens when you ask for help.
So nice to hear. When I first heard about and purchased the "25th" anniversary edition, I vowed to not reread it until I could do with this edition. It was a long wait! It's an illuminating experience when you really want to reread a favorite -- why now, what does it provide, etc -- but can't (or won't). It was worth the wait, partly because it inspired me to write about it. I will reread the tetralogy soon.
This is probably the most brilliant sales pitch for a book that I’ve ever read. I myself am proud owner of #160. Thank you for helping to deliver the project to completion.
This is one of my favorite books in existence and I think it may the actual most beautifully written thing I’ve ever read. I ordered it back when it was “Little Big 25th anniversary edition” for a spouse that I haven’t been with for 15 years now. What a long, incredible road to get here.
I remember when you could pre-order this anniversary edition of Little, Big from the Of The Jungle catalog, in the early 2000s. It was advertised with the hook that Terrence McKenna liked it. It was like, come for the DMT experience, stay for the beautiful prose! Strong stuff.
I went on to read most of Crowley's novels, mainly for that beautiful prose. My favorite is Beasts, followed by The Solitudes and The Translator.
So first, before I forget, I want to mention that my last name is M@ch3n. As I was typing that I was thinking about the possible unwiseness of including my last name here. Yet, I pretty much gave up on the idea of anonymity a long time ago, so there you have it.
My partner and I stumbled on a town called Machen in Wales, while we were driving up to Betws-y-Coed. Anyway, I'm digressing. I just wanted to tell Erik that his review was amazing to read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It all really spoke to the journey i've been on probably since I was a little kid. Okay, I'll call it my life's journey.
I kept thinking that Erik has explored so many of the paths I've maybe been curious about, but too scared to follow to the end. I felt like he was offering me a fuller map of the 'realm'. Just in the last few months, i've been letting go of my dream of living to witness a psychedelic hippie utopia.
My whole worldview was constructed around nostalgia for a time that I wasn't even alive to experience. I started smoking pot three times a day when I was fourteen, and tried mushrooms when I was fifteen. I still have the distinct memory of when they were coming on. I had walked outside into the cul de sac I lived in, in a rural cultural backwater of SoCal.
I looked up at the night sky and four, probably the first time in my life, I felt a sense of the one-ness with the universe, like I was home, and totally safe. The trip soon went South when my two years' older friend and his buddy decided they want to to go to Elfin Forest and look for the White Lady.
I immediately had a gut feeling that it was a bad idea, to get into a car, but I went along with them, because, what else was I going to do? So, luckily, I had only eaten maybe a gram, and the fear and loathing that ensued wasn't as thoroughly nightmarish as it could have been. Anyway, I didn't intend to digress to sharing the story of my first semi-bad trip, here on a public forum.
Anyway, I've been following Erik's blog for at least a year now, and have several times been struck by how closely our paths have come, or, gone. I saw the Dead when I was eighteen in '87 and was immediately 'on the bus'. I've been interested in esoteric arcana since my teens, as well. When the difference between Erik's and my journey's is that mine has been
far more solitary, but with an ever present yearning for community and connection.
So i'm going to have to say that my journey has been more one of misadventures and disappointments, than I imagine Erik's has. Not that I'm trying to make any point with comparisons. I'll just end this screed now with a mention of the fact that from the first time I tried l s d, when I was sixteen, I've had sort of a love/fear relationship with it.
Well, here I go, making this ramble just a little bit longer. When I was eighteen in my freshman year at NAU nerdy loner dorm mate found a copy of Be Here Now in the laundry room our dorm. He handed it to me and said "here, this looks like it's right up your alley". The sudden presence of that book in my life, sort of hit me like a lightning bolt.
I interpreted it as a gift from the acid spirits, or something, and chose to think of it as a confirmation that I was on the 'right' path. Up until that point I had no guides to, well, guide me on my psychedelic explorations, other than the Castaneda, books and Jim Morrison's biography. Jim, as we all know, not exactly being a paragon of level headedness!
It took me until I was well into my 20s, to start realizing the irony, or mabye irony isn't the right word, of the fact that all the people I chose to be my heroes had either been in the 27 club, or gone mad, like Syd. I blame it on Aunt Nancy, and her DARE campaign.
She and her handlers, in all their wisdom, apparently never considered that some of us would actually be fascinated by the drug paraphernalia, they showed us in seventh grade, and would be chomping at the bit to start trying it all out. Anyway, I think that's enough of my druggie biography to all y'all, that I don't even know!!
I just want to thank Erik for giving me some puzzle pieces to hopefully build a path forward after having spent thirty plus years doggedly hanging on to the spirit of the sixties as a solitary bearer of the flame for the Psychedelic Renaissance.
It's so strange to me that now that i've had a decade or more to witness the flowering of said renaissance, i'm now being called to leave it behind, while watching it recede into the rearview mirror. The complex psychedelic fantasy world that I constructed, starting in my teens, included the hope of one day getting to do some guided journeys, and experience some of the heroism of my chosen spirit guides, Ram Dass and Timothy Leary.
My opportunity to do a semi above ground series of guided journeys came in 2020. Having had a couple seriously harrowing experiences with high dose psilocybin and bufo, I came away with the heavy realization that I was living in a psychedelic Wild West period. I feel really lucky that I stumbled on Jules Evans' blog later that year.
He was the first voice in the wilderness that spoke about the need for more understanding of what Integration actually means. So, it seems the Universe has been putting people, and content in my line of sight that has been really helpful to me as of late. I feel extremely lucky that I more or less have all my faculties intact at 55 years old.
I don't know what my adult-life-long preoccupation with psychedelics 'means' for me now that i'm ,hopefully, coming through the other side of a lot of grief and sadness about finally realizing that the world isn't going to 'do' what I wanted it to do, ie; Get 'better'. Who knows, maybe I have some wisdom to impart to someone who may be in the 'thick of it' with psychedelics, spirituallity, esotericism, etcetera.
Jeez, the upon reading my screed, I see that some editing would have been wise. I'm using the voice-to-text function on my phone, and it could use a little tailoring to my voice characteristics.
So, now I'm forced to accept that what I just shared makes it sound like my brain is probably more scrambled than it actually is, haha.
Thanks for this reco Erik. Little, Big has been on my iPad since I read the Aegypt books a couple years ago and I’d forgotten about it. Started reading yesterday and it’s just the kind of book I was looking to read next. Like you, lately I’ve been getting into more subtle magical experiences, largely through books and movies and their ability to transport me to other worlds and provoke soul stirring contemplations.
What a nice cosmic coincidence. I was reading Robert Kirk's The Secret Commonwealth or A TREATISE DISPLAYING THE CHEIF CURIOSITIES AMONG THE PEOPLE OF SCOTLAND AS THEY ARE IN USE TO THIS DAY BEING FOR THE MOST PART SINGULAR TO THAT NATION A SUBJECT NOT HERETOFORE DISCOURSED OF BY ANY OF OUR WRITERS DONE TO THE SATISFACTION OF HIS FRIENDS BY A MODEST INQUIRER, LIVING AMONG THE SCOTTISH-IRISH.
And this put me in mind to pick up Little Big once again. Then your email arrived. The Gentle People are watching...
What an interesting comment, though I don't quite understand why the plot-driven stuff is aligned with the tone, which is not quite "tongue in cheek" to my ears but something close. But the bare-bones version of that family, stripped of any actual magic, is funny and a bit disturbing to contemplate. It's true, most our experience of such generations deep indirection in a family tends to hover around things that warp. The enchantment, in other words, is precisely in the writing style itself.
“The enchantment, in other words, is precisely in the writing style itself.” Yes! To this.
I will be curious how this treats you. Many many passages I found terribly moving but not always in a "deep" way, which made it all more...deep? meaningful? not TOO meaningful? Now I am plotting when to take on the tetrology again.
That’s interesting…what we consider “deep”…deep thought vs. deep feeling. I’d suggest that what is being moved is the heart and soul. The mind tends to seek out more…more ideas, more thought. When reading a book like Little, Big it’s a good practice to let the mind relax and simply take it in, surrender it to the mythopoetic soul food being offered up. I know you probably get this, I just wanted to try and articulate it for myself.
I came to the comment section with the intention of responding to Eric's post, and your comment is in keeping with the general uncanniness of how much his words spoke to me. I mean, just about everything i've just read has seemed to be almost crafted just for me, to help me understand the 'place' i'm in right now.
So, I just wanted to say I appreciate everything you shared in your comment. To be more specific, your words spoke to my lifelong tendency to maybe want to find 'deeper meaning' in the mundane. Ever since my teens, i've had a habit of trying to make a merely good experience The Ultimate.
So, to read your words about the mythopoetic as a source of relaxation was really right on for me.
Nice to hear Morgan, and to feel the connection. Thanks for that.
Wow I love concordances like this. I still remember when I first read Kirk, back in my 20s in NYC. It definitely opened doors, and clearly still does!
Yes it is a bit of an infomercial. But what a charmed commodity! Glad you are a lover...
Big fan of TechGnosis and delighted to see you are still around--loved the xlnt review
Yes this puppy has been a long time coming. I also love Ka, one of my favorite books about/with death in the picture.
I read back through the project update history, and it strikes me that the long delay really boils down to someone just not asking for help. Amazing what happens when you ask for help.
Just wanted to note that Brian has a cool podcast, Howl in the Wilderness. In fact I am supposed to be on it soon, we still need to set a date...
So nice to hear. When I first heard about and purchased the "25th" anniversary edition, I vowed to not reread it until I could do with this edition. It was a long wait! It's an illuminating experience when you really want to reread a favorite -- why now, what does it provide, etc -- but can't (or won't). It was worth the wait, partly because it inspired me to write about it. I will reread the tetralogy soon.
This is probably the most brilliant sales pitch for a book that I’ve ever read. I myself am proud owner of #160. Thank you for helping to deliver the project to completion.
This is one of my favorite books in existence and I think it may the actual most beautifully written thing I’ve ever read. I ordered it back when it was “Little Big 25th anniversary edition” for a spouse that I haven’t been with for 15 years now. What a long, incredible road to get here.
I remember when you could pre-order this anniversary edition of Little, Big from the Of The Jungle catalog, in the early 2000s. It was advertised with the hook that Terrence McKenna liked it. It was like, come for the DMT experience, stay for the beautiful prose! Strong stuff.
I went on to read most of Crowley's novels, mainly for that beautiful prose. My favorite is Beasts, followed by The Solitudes and The Translator.
How my comment ended up between one from september seventh, and one from september twelfth is beyond me...
So first, before I forget, I want to mention that my last name is M@ch3n. As I was typing that I was thinking about the possible unwiseness of including my last name here. Yet, I pretty much gave up on the idea of anonymity a long time ago, so there you have it.
My partner and I stumbled on a town called Machen in Wales, while we were driving up to Betws-y-Coed. Anyway, I'm digressing. I just wanted to tell Erik that his review was amazing to read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It all really spoke to the journey i've been on probably since I was a little kid. Okay, I'll call it my life's journey.
I kept thinking that Erik has explored so many of the paths I've maybe been curious about, but too scared to follow to the end. I felt like he was offering me a fuller map of the 'realm'. Just in the last few months, i've been letting go of my dream of living to witness a psychedelic hippie utopia.
My whole worldview was constructed around nostalgia for a time that I wasn't even alive to experience. I started smoking pot three times a day when I was fourteen, and tried mushrooms when I was fifteen. I still have the distinct memory of when they were coming on. I had walked outside into the cul de sac I lived in, in a rural cultural backwater of SoCal.
I looked up at the night sky and four, probably the first time in my life, I felt a sense of the one-ness with the universe, like I was home, and totally safe. The trip soon went South when my two years' older friend and his buddy decided they want to to go to Elfin Forest and look for the White Lady.
I immediately had a gut feeling that it was a bad idea, to get into a car, but I went along with them, because, what else was I going to do? So, luckily, I had only eaten maybe a gram, and the fear and loathing that ensued wasn't as thoroughly nightmarish as it could have been. Anyway, I didn't intend to digress to sharing the story of my first semi-bad trip, here on a public forum.
Anyway, I've been following Erik's blog for at least a year now, and have several times been struck by how closely our paths have come, or, gone. I saw the Dead when I was eighteen in '87 and was immediately 'on the bus'. I've been interested in esoteric arcana since my teens, as well. When the difference between Erik's and my journey's is that mine has been
far more solitary, but with an ever present yearning for community and connection.
So i'm going to have to say that my journey has been more one of misadventures and disappointments, than I imagine Erik's has. Not that I'm trying to make any point with comparisons. I'll just end this screed now with a mention of the fact that from the first time I tried l s d, when I was sixteen, I've had sort of a love/fear relationship with it.
Well, here I go, making this ramble just a little bit longer. When I was eighteen in my freshman year at NAU nerdy loner dorm mate found a copy of Be Here Now in the laundry room our dorm. He handed it to me and said "here, this looks like it's right up your alley". The sudden presence of that book in my life, sort of hit me like a lightning bolt.
I interpreted it as a gift from the acid spirits, or something, and chose to think of it as a confirmation that I was on the 'right' path. Up until that point I had no guides to, well, guide me on my psychedelic explorations, other than the Castaneda, books and Jim Morrison's biography. Jim, as we all know, not exactly being a paragon of level headedness!
It took me until I was well into my 20s, to start realizing the irony, or mabye irony isn't the right word, of the fact that all the people I chose to be my heroes had either been in the 27 club, or gone mad, like Syd. I blame it on Aunt Nancy, and her DARE campaign.
She and her handlers, in all their wisdom, apparently never considered that some of us would actually be fascinated by the drug paraphernalia, they showed us in seventh grade, and would be chomping at the bit to start trying it all out. Anyway, I think that's enough of my druggie biography to all y'all, that I don't even know!!
I just want to thank Erik for giving me some puzzle pieces to hopefully build a path forward after having spent thirty plus years doggedly hanging on to the spirit of the sixties as a solitary bearer of the flame for the Psychedelic Renaissance.
It's so strange to me that now that i've had a decade or more to witness the flowering of said renaissance, i'm now being called to leave it behind, while watching it recede into the rearview mirror. The complex psychedelic fantasy world that I constructed, starting in my teens, included the hope of one day getting to do some guided journeys, and experience some of the heroism of my chosen spirit guides, Ram Dass and Timothy Leary.
My opportunity to do a semi above ground series of guided journeys came in 2020. Having had a couple seriously harrowing experiences with high dose psilocybin and bufo, I came away with the heavy realization that I was living in a psychedelic Wild West period. I feel really lucky that I stumbled on Jules Evans' blog later that year.
He was the first voice in the wilderness that spoke about the need for more understanding of what Integration actually means. So, it seems the Universe has been putting people, and content in my line of sight that has been really helpful to me as of late. I feel extremely lucky that I more or less have all my faculties intact at 55 years old.
I don't know what my adult-life-long preoccupation with psychedelics 'means' for me now that i'm ,hopefully, coming through the other side of a lot of grief and sadness about finally realizing that the world isn't going to 'do' what I wanted it to do, ie; Get 'better'. Who knows, maybe I have some wisdom to impart to someone who may be in the 'thick of it' with psychedelics, spirituallity, esotericism, etcetera.
Jeez, the upon reading my screed, I see that some editing would have been wise. I'm using the voice-to-text function on my phone, and it could use a little tailoring to my voice characteristics.
So, now I'm forced to accept that what I just shared makes it sound like my brain is probably more scrambled than it actually is, haha.
Thanks for this reco Erik. Little, Big has been on my iPad since I read the Aegypt books a couple years ago and I’d forgotten about it. Started reading yesterday and it’s just the kind of book I was looking to read next. Like you, lately I’ve been getting into more subtle magical experiences, largely through books and movies and their ability to transport me to other worlds and provoke soul stirring contemplations.
What a nice cosmic coincidence. I was reading Robert Kirk's The Secret Commonwealth or A TREATISE DISPLAYING THE CHEIF CURIOSITIES AMONG THE PEOPLE OF SCOTLAND AS THEY ARE IN USE TO THIS DAY BEING FOR THE MOST PART SINGULAR TO THAT NATION A SUBJECT NOT HERETOFORE DISCOURSED OF BY ANY OF OUR WRITERS DONE TO THE SATISFACTION OF HIS FRIENDS BY A MODEST INQUIRER, LIVING AMONG THE SCOTTISH-IRISH.
And this put me in mind to pick up Little Big once again. Then your email arrived. The Gentle People are watching...