136
PARTISAN REVIEW
TH E WHOLE EARTH
PASSAGES ABOUT EARTH : AN EXPLORATION OF THE NEW
PLANETARY CULTURE .
By
Wi lliam Irwin Thompson. Harper
&
Row .
$6.95 .
This most recent book by William Irwin Thompson is evidence
that neither a trained intellect , an expensive education, nor the study of
history can protect you from a will to believe. It is also evidence of the gratifi–
cations that accompany an adaption of
"Credo quia absurdum est"
as one's
working slogan . His fust book ,
The Imagination ofan Insurrection (1967) ,
was evidence of something else. Its announced theme was "the role of
imagination in history " ; its subject-matter, the relation of Irish literature to
the insurrection of Easter, 1916 ; its methods , rational ; its conclusions,
tough ; its moral, disenchanted ; its conception of history , secular . In spite of
quirks and crotchets , it looked like the first work of an academic historian
whose future work promised to be more than merely academic.
His second book ,
At the Edge of History
(1971) , reneged on that
promise . It is an account of Thompson 's attempt " to gain a perspective on
history by getting out of history ," alas . It is an account of how he left the
academy, exposed himself to the future at the Esalen Institute of Big Sur , and
wound up in Montreal , a kind of Rivendell (as in Tolkien) , "the perfect
retreat in which to look from one end of history to the other." What he saw
was, on the one hand , the death of everything as we know it, including
bourgeois democracy, the industrial nation-state , print , rationality , the
famil y, " Homo Sexualis, " and Homo sapiens ; and on the other hand , the
birth of a new cosmic consciousness and a new planetary culture .
In his second book Thompson was still at the edge looking around; his
new book is a product of his leap into the abyss of faith. Its matter falls into
three categories: 1) accounts of the portents and contents of the new
planetary civilization ; 2) advertisements for the Lindisfarne Association ,
which Thompson founded in 1973 in Southampton , Long Island , and where
students of all ages may enroll in courses' 'for the transformation of conscious–
ness as the foundation for a person's existence in the new p lanetary culture " ;
3) materials for a future hagiography of William Irwin Thompson .
Thompson does not argue his case for the coming extinction of Homo
sapiens and all his products. The portents are everywhere and unmistakeable.
He is more concerned with prophesying " the now emerging new age of the
