In search of Mount Analogue


Social media speaks in the binary vocabulary of 'like' and 'dislike' to the total exclusion of the myriad nuanced positions between these two extremes. In his forgotten memoir Spring Street Summer Christopher Hudson describes a teacher of the first binary generation at Michigan State University in the 1980s lamenting that "'All his students cared about was getting grades that would look good on their CVs. They had no time for ambiguity or sublety, no time for doubt". Thirty years earlier in his prescient masterwork Mount Analogue, French writer René Daumal had portrayed an imaginary search for "A way that unites Heaven and Earth, which must exist, otherwise our situation would be without hope". As yet the binary generation has failed to discover Mount Analogue, and the result is a digital culture that hates ambiguity.

Graphic shows the 1968 City Lights edition of Mount Analogue. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk Also on Facebook and Twitter.

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