The World Without

Abstract

I have the impression that the man in Edmund Wilson’s novel, I Thought of Daisy, did not like what he had learned of philosphy at college. He preferred another conception of the world, the conception of it as a familiar, warm, colourful, sound-filled place to be shared with others — and perhaps especially with Daisy. I sympathise.

All that I ever learned at college of philosophy had been a conception of the external world as a colourless and soundless wilderness whose true nature one could never know, which one could not even imagine — but which I did, none the less, imagine as a vast landscape of polar spaces in whose eternal twilight one wandered, preoccupied and deluded by a flicker of magic-lantern pictures which danced inside one’s mind and for ever remained private to oneself.

Edmund Wilson, I Thought of Daisy